Everything in your explanation seems completely right —except I have a quibble with the last part. Americans have a very weak conception of the structure and role of the state but they ricochet between very high expectations of what the state should do for them, and a reluctance to accept their own dependence on the state. These things often come together in the form of an overwhelming feeling of discontent that is sometimes very vague (something is wrong, malaise has set in, the government is at fault that my life is not as I want it to be) and sometimes specific to an absurd degree (egg/gas/housing prices should be lower, everyone should be able to find a job, and anything bad which happens such as a crime or a terrorist attack, should always have been prevented by the government).
That last one might seem explicable even on the most narrow form of the social contract. But it takes the form that bad events should be prevented entirely, which is not terribly realistic. If you don’t have a clear sense of how things happen or why though, you will be likely to accept the idea that it’s some quality of the leader e.g., ‘strength’ or ‘intelligence’ that are essential to preventing the events you don’t want. And that’s how it has been in US politics for some time. The president is assumed to manage the economy, and this is seen as the president’s main job, with an ancillary job of being responsible for the culture. (Running the government seems an afterthought for many.) So if Joe Biden is ‘woke’ this meant that the casting of movies was not to your liking. The nebulousness lends itself to fascism—one wants that special and strong leader. Except our expectations are too high, and too concretely economic. So it’s unlikely to work long term or generate the blind gratitude and loyalty someone like Hoxha could get by telling the Albanians there was a wool surplus.
(The likelihood of discontent unfortunately creates a strong incentive to select both internal and external enemies to palm off the failures on.)
In addition to their high expectations for security, Americans also have very high expectations for personal freedom, though they are also willing to accept bad tradeoffs in the tension between freedom and security, if they think this makes them safer, but someone else less free.
So maybe its the willingness to universalize we’re losing. Possibly when Americans had clearer international foils in the forms of despotic governments elsewhere (plus the certainty all deprived people were elsewhere) we could take pride in the fact that everyone in the US had more freedom, and prosperity than elsewhere. Besides some economic shifts, we don’t have those foils anymore (and capitalists don’t have those threats in the form of international communism). So Americans see themselves more as customers than as citizens, and the reflected pride they had for their good fortune starts to seem a bit tarnished. This also makes Trump’s mode of both lamenting and promising appealing, since he uses that feeling of rivalry with other governments, and the promise of besting them while also warning us that ‘people are laughing at us’ because we are ‘being taken advantage of.’
The connection between libertarianism and fascism has often seemed to me to flow from personal umbrage about the idea of being ruled, even (especially) in the form of demands for cooperation under rules of fairness. The libertarian only offers a potential for mastery of others as a consequence of pure self-rule though. It’s especially attractive for the person who assumes they will be a master of industry. It can’t guarantee one will have mastery over others, since it holds to a certain idea of equality in the form of equal liberty (and assumes the state is always the culprit in restricting liberty). But, as a fantasy, you’re at least spared the indignity of ever being coerced by the democratic choices of others in your society.
How much better then will fascism look to a person attracted to libertarianism for the reason of avoiding any social demand whatsoever. Fascism promise to completely shake off even constraints posed by informal moral cooperation, and non-enforceable expectations of fairness, where people around you expect you to behave as if they also matter. It offers a guarantee of rule over others, which was likely an implicit sweetener for many people attracted to libertarianism who would have to get that by becoming masters of industry. Surely, *they* aren’t the weak who may falter in the absence of government social supports. With fascism, they don’t even have to worry about working to rise to the top—in the fascist fantasy it’s a sure thing you’ll dominate all the people who formerly annoyed you You won’t be free of domination yourself, because you will have a despotic leader you must obey—but the despotic leader is going to institute a kind of permission structure that allows for you and everyone like you to dominate others without even the informal interference of ‘woke scolds, feminist or anti-racist ideas, etc. that threaten to assert you’re a jerk for assuming your subjectivity determines reality, and your wants must be at the center of all interactions
You can see this in Yarvin’s work. He dreams of being ruled by a king, but clearly that king is not going to be a ‘woke’ king, who urges us to be kind, cooperative, and acknowledge the subjectivity of others—i.e., those informal but purely voluntary moral constraints which so intensely bug the shit out of the fascist. (The libertarian does not address since as deniers of the significance of society, they leave all social pressure aside). The ruler re-makes even the private sphere in the mode amenable to those who reject the subjectivity of others, provided they lack the characteristics that the fascist finds revolting.
Probably due to American supremacy since WWII and other well-perused historical reasons, the US was unique in not undertaking - willfully, self-consciously and deliberately, as happened in w. Europe - to build a social democracy with networks of institutions that directly involve citizens in the allocation of resources - the much maligned “nanny state” - which is actually far more resistant to authoritarian collapse than fragmented, clientelistic, “libertarian” societies, in which citizens barely feature except as producers and consumers.
I think it’s too often forgotten that the construction of post-war social democracies was a *willful* process in Europe (and by extension Canada, which was gliding in the UK/Beveridge report wake) - and that even had buy-in from Christian Democrats - and was very self-consciously a political response to the lived experience of Nazi terror, occupation and the deepest recognition of how vulnerable and fragile democracies can be. This can’t be overstated, and was felt at all levels of society.
Seems that some kind of awakening to this profound vulnerability is now happening, but it’s coming from within courtesy of the Trump admin.’s piledriver. (Of course Europe is also now doing some terrible backsliding, but that's another story).
It seems to me that the states didn't have much of a non-pejorative-idiom for Trumpy politics before he came on the scene. "Conservative" conjured bush/romney/church/suit-and-tie types. But there were still a lot of "anti-establishment", conspiratorial young men who hated the libs but were relatively secular and wanted the state not leave stuff they liked alone (weed, maybe abortion). Good chance you call yourself a libertatian if that was the case, even if you don't have particularly strong attachment to e.g., the non-aggression principle or the fountainhead. And then Trump comes on the scene, and he's got what you like about libertarianism without the wackier anti-statism, and you're off to the races. I'm curious to what extent the libertarian-to-hard-right pipeline holds now that more-explicitly-rightist politics are more accessible and less taboo.
I was also thinking about this when I listened to your interview hosted by the Leo Baeck Institute, particularly the discussion of how American fascism would take on American symbols of freedom, apple pie, etc. "Freedom" in the American context has deep roots being used to refer to the right to amass and enjoy property (not incompatible with the hard right), and historically for that "property" to include other people (obviously compatible with the hard right). So it makes sense the American hard right would label themselves libertarians, as you get plausible deniability by equivocating without selling out.
I think another aspect of this is the inherent contradictions in being a conservative opponent of modernity, given that modernity has well and truly triumphed. First, there's the issue that abolishing modernity requires exactly the sort of radicalism that conservatives normally disdain. And second, while Rothbard said he wanted to repeal the 20th century, no one really wants a time machine to 1900. How to have AI and Bitcoin and television and tiktok while also repealing modernity is an unsolved and unsolvable problem, and it leads to embracing other contradictory ideas.
One thing that interwar fascism included was a sense (or just hope) that further development of modernity would eliminate the parts they didn't like. Although there's some of that in discussion of AI now, I think almost everyone on the right has given up these hopes at this point.
I think that's exactly the founding principle for modern tech fascists - it's most blatant with genAI, but 'further development of modernity [eliminating] the parts they [don't] like' is the foundation from Nick Land's hyper-accelerationism on. Democracy, 'wokeness', humanity itself - these are 'bugs' that can and will be 'fixed' by better design and more and 'better' tech
Social conservatism or progressiveness is not the same thing as technological 'conservatism' or 'progress', though it's easy to forget that in the face of so much discourse that assumes otherwise. It's not a contradiction for fascists to venerate the machine while scorning the Enlightenment, because in their view, the Enlightenment was a defect born of early tech that new tech will defeat
I agree that it's not a contradiction to love machines but hate enlightenment values, as you say. But lots of conservatives explicitly venerate pre-modern values, and it is a contradiction to love the Bronze Age but also electric cars.
The conservative ideal is not about being of a particular time, but about being right. Whether due to divine intervention, closer attention to human instinct, or some other factor, conservatives believe we reached a moral apex a long time ago. Technological progress is cumulative; moral progress is just about matching an already-known ideal.
On the one hand, you could just chalk this up to Eco's 'Ur-Fascism' contention that the first attribute of it is irreconcilable syncretism. But I think an undercurrent of it is that, by embracing our roles as 'the technological creature', we will conversely lead ourselves back to the righteous state of nature - what members of Devo, in their earliest writings, called 'reaching the ideal state of Fred Flintstone: the technologically advanced caveman'
Here is at least one place that the fundamentalists come in. Although they have a reputation for being anti-science, there are other ways in which they have a strong affinity for technological development. I recall a book I read late in grad school that referred to them as "rational progressive primitivists".
The immediate ancestors of fundamentalist churches staked out their ground on a semi-Lockean Watchmaker-constructed universe, not especially unlike the Deist conception, and were opposed to subjectivist philosophies like Romanticism. They expected to be at the forefront of science, only to be blindsided by Darwin and never recover. Their anti-modernism is *entirely* out of frustration; they believed the world was and should be rationally explainable because it was rationally constructed.
Not primarily (and this will be complicated). The creedal conservative churches of early America are not direct ancestors of fundamentalism, though most have fundamentalist branches now. The primary group I'm thinking of stems from the Radical Reformation churches, such as the Anabaptists. (The Amish are an anomalous throwback.)
Radical Reformation churches appealed directly to the Bible for authority to counter the Catholic priesthood. They believed that the Bible produced the church, rather than the other way round. While that might not seem like promising ground for empiricism, most held that God's revelation could be found in *two* "books", and the other was the "book of nature". Both books had to be studied exactingly and rationally to reveal God's will. Moreover, it meant that the priestly and aristocratic hierarchies had no rightful authority and should be pulled down. The motto of the Hussites, the earliest group of which we have definite records, was "the Law of Christ is sufficient". Radical Reform churches usually ended up supporting democracy, but as a half-measure toward the abolition of government. Over time the teachings of Radical churches were usually watered down by repeated failures.
The largest Radical Reformation group in America at the time of the Revolution were the Baptists, although these were highly doctrinally modified by that point. There were also some smaller groups such as the Haldanes--Michael Faraday was a Haldane. However, the Second Great Awakening produced a new wave of RR churches, beginning with the Campbell-Stone Restoration Movement. Radical ideas also spread into creedal-conservative churches to produce their fundamentalist wings. For reasons I don't fully understand, these new churches were much less attached to socialism and gave it up after the failed experiments of the 1840s. They were *initially* anti-authoritarian, supporting open discussion and dissent. They were also prone to science-fictional sounding doctrines such as belief in life on other planets. Over time, nearly all of them have curdled, with increasingly rigid doctrines and "moderator" positions becoming priestly-bureaucratic (the Watchtower Society, which was once an open forum for discussion, is a good example). It's hard to say how much of this is inherent and how much is a reaction to the collapse of watchmaker-style empiricism. Nonetheless, it should remind you strongly of Less Wrong.
So, a partial accounting: some but not all Baptist churches, non-charismatic nondenominational evangelical churches, the Churches of Christ and the Christian Churches, and most of the "weird" American churches (such as Jehovah's Witnesses and LDS), as well as most non-charismatic fundamentalist branches of other churches. There are also a small number of "imported" but relatively pure-strain Radicals, such as the Moravians and Mennonites. These tend to be more interested in democratic socialism.
From my knowledge of tge rhetoric of these movements, I suspect they gathered the same general sort of person attracted by Yudkowski. Thry emphasized that reason is a natural human capacity but one that can be trained, and if you want to develop yours why not come study with us? In practice, for whatever reason, they developed the same sort of rigid orthodoxy about esoteric points and libertarian attitude.
AH! I was just trying figure out what happened to the Diggers and the Ranters, and whether they morphed into anything here in the US.
I can’t quite find out.
As much as I love debating esoteric points, I’m more a fan of the Quakers or John Wesley when it comes to my sects. If you’re going to do estotericism in religion, I’d prefer a Nagarjuna or a Averroes or a Hans Kung —don’t muddle it into your doctrine and create conflicts and splinter sects.
It's actually kind of strange how Ayn Rand was cited as an influence on the Tea Party movement but is hardly mentioned now, despite how much the current crisis is a Bizarro funhouse mirror of the endgame of Atlas Shrugged.
In the book the evil collectivists running the government order all private companies to freeze hiring and production, in a boneheaded move to make the economy stay good. This triggers a resource and infrastructure crisis throughout the country, and so the government kidnaps über-creator John Galt and tortures him to try to coerce him into 'becoming a dictator' to fix their problems. After the captains of industry rescue Galt, they let the entire country consume itself in self-destruction before they, the creative, productive survivors, plan to build a new world over the graveyard of the old.
It's ludicrous but kind of campy fun as a read, but now has a sinister air of projection, like the story is being told by an unreliable narrator, and in doing so clarifies the mindset at work in the libertarian-to-fascism pipeline.
Rand is simply too unpopular to get much attention now. Non-libertarians find her loathsome and unreadable, while most of her hardcore "objectivist" followers refused to consider themselves libertarians. Where her influence still exists, it's simply left unspoken most of the time.
The Galt torture scene is very obviously a pastiche of O'Brien torturing Winston, with the distinction that doublethink is incapable of working in practice; the O'Brien figure cannot really reject science and still keep his machines functional. Libertarians genuinely do not see any difference between the fascist state and thr communist one, other than a few policy details; both are "armed gangs out to dominate the people" to paraphrase Rand.
Rothbard’s discussion of the Italian free-market economists is missing some Italy-specific features of corporate industrialization, which was always dependent on state largesse, a system of patronage and “clientelismo” combined with tariff-driven mercantilism, and being totally unrelated to any integrated national concept of obligations, responsibilities, or even a formal legal or constitutional structure. This was sometimes referred to as “ministerialismo” going back to the fascist period and on through afterwards - corporate heads using state roles as transactional vectors, independent of the state as a juridical or social policy structure of democratic interchange. This is why the actual *political* nature of the state was irrelevant to them - democratic, fascist, monarchist, whatever, it didn’t matter, they could work with them all, as long as the system of clientelism remained untouched.
Mostly I think it’s just some context that actually reinforces your point that “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’”, and, “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.”
The point I was trying to emphasize is that underlying these ideas, in the Italian context, is basically the result of a *failed* national project - it’s the historical *absence* of the state as anything other than a middle-man of convenience, a patronage mechanism (and occasionally a muscle-flexing labour suppression tool) that - on the surface paradoxically perhaps - created the conditions for the totalitarian model (needless to say, in many ways it’s just the mafia model of governance by a combination of threats and patronage, whose endurance to this day has always been premised on the absence or failure of anything resembling a functional, juridical state.)
Fascist corporatists would find themselves very comfortable, I think, in modern Singapore, where one of the tech tycoon “Network State” ideologues, Balaji Srinivasan, has renounced his US citizenship and decamped to. A one-party state on a totally corporatist model with CEOs and gov’t ministers in a perpetual revolving door. The state as the absence of the state.
I agree with the main thrust of the article (unless I misread you) that a desire for domination - particularly personally exercised domination in fascism's sadistic style - is key to understanding the connective tissue between Rothbardian libertarians and fascism. I think part of the problem is that Adorno's contribution to The Authoritarian Personality, namely the F-Scale, has warped our thinking on what 'authoritarianism' actually is. Two of Adorno's specifications "Conventionalism: conformity to the traditional societal norms and values of the middle class" & "Authoritarian submission: a passive notion towards adhering to conventional norms and values" are real "cuckservatism" from a modern American far-right perspective (and indeed from the original Nazis and Fascisti, truth be told). The Rothbardian libertarian sees the unregulated free market as a means by which the human inequality and racial hierarchies they believe divide humanity can be reestablished. They celebrate the market because it creates inequality, which they see as validating their supremacist views, be they masculinist, ethnic or racial. Or at least it would - so they believe - if the woke regime would stop interfering in the proper operation of the market to redistribute income to the weak and those that natural selection would otherwise be pruning from the tree of humanity. Social Darwinism is the ideological linkage, and rage and ressentiment and the desire to validate the ego through the personal sovereignty of sadistic domination over those they see as unworthy, is the social psychological side of the coin
I have been trying to study some very early manifestations of libertarianism, such as that instantiated by David Lipscomb, and I tend to think that if the state they believe is repressing them is truly so different from the bourgeois state that socialists believe repressed the workers, the cause is a failure to distinguish clearly what anyone means by "state". That is, a great many people of low to moderate education (and perhaps some well-educated but highly specialized people) have only a muddled conception of "the government which tells us what to do and for which we occasionally vote"--not just conservatives, but also liberals and leftists, if perhaps in smaller numbers.
I say this because Lipscombian libertarianism, and possibly other "paleo" varieties, seems to have developed from the disappointments of American experiments with utopian or anarcho-socialism, in which the predecessors of modern fundamentalist churches participated between 1840 and 1880. All these societies failed, apparently spontaneously, and subsequently the churches that had supported them turned well to the right--but without substantially changing their perspective on government.
Lipscomb's treatment of government is highly theological, but this passage from "On Civil Government" sums up his secular-ish critique: "Every human government uses the substance, the time, the service of the subjects to enrich, gratify the appetites and lusts, and to promote the grandeur and glory of the rulers. And it is not true that in democratic or any other kind of governments the people themselves are rulers. They choose the rulers, at the instigation of a few interested leaders, then these rulers rule for their own selfish good and glory as other rulers do."
Just a quick off-topic note: In case anyone missed this, John's book got a quasi-favorable review here: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/reviews/back-to-the-90s/ -- This is the Phenomenal World site, dated Oct 3, 2024. The site deals with matters of interest to social scientists with, it seems to me, a heavy weight on economics.
I figured. When your paperback comes out (later this year?) I hope you can write an essay addressing the misinterpretations because I think the whole topic is very important and it would be useful to those of us grappling with things to have the kinks ironed out in a ready roundup.
Way too much insider baseball intellectual history to get my head fully around but absolutely fascinating discussion; including all your commenters. First stab at a public high school social studies classroom synopsis: Democracy breeds libertarianism and under most normal circumstances is grist for the mill of civilization and culture; a loyal opposition, just another dissonant voice in the raucous chorus of democracy. But in crisis circumstances, say, a global pandemic, world war, terrible economic downturns and/or some other form of widespread social depravation, libertarianism can fuse with fascism as a desperate bid to end democracy and politics; to end having to negotiate a world with others, to end gridlock and social dysfunction. Its promise is elite rule and total technological automation; its outcomes extremely rigid forms of social inequality and violent authority.
Amazing piece. I'm reminded of Richard Landes's essay on the Melian Dialogue and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in The Paranoid Apocalypse, a hundred-year retrospective on the latter.
"In any case, the voice of the Elders was not a recognizably Jewish voice. But it was familiar. Indeed it was a common voice, even a cacophony of voices. It was Socrates's foe in Book II of the Republic, Thrasymachus arguing "might makes right." It was the Athenians' to the Melians according to Thucydides. It was libido dominandi, invoked favorably by the Romans and, even as he deplored it, accepted by Augustine as an immutable dimension of political life. It was the voice of Carolingian lords and clergymen as they hewed their way through tribal Europe; it was the voice of the German aristocracy in the century before the Peasants' War of 1524, when they argued that private warfare - that is, their rampages - were good for public peace because they "pruned back" the troublesome peasantry. It was the voice of Machiavelli in his advice to the Prince. It was the voice of Bismarck. In a more civil form, it has a school in modern academies called "realism.""
Landes argued that, while it was obviously not to the exclusion of antisemitic content for its own sake, another function of the Protocols was to voice the "classical realist's" way of coping with the democratization of the world (and it was, of course, a plagiarism and systematic perversion of a pro-democratic satire on Napoleon III). If everyone is ruled - psychologically, politically - by the libido dominandi, you can't possibly accept that this is a good faith experiment in universal freedom, so what is it?
When libertarians/fascists cite all these theorists, maybe they are just window-dressing a very simple thing: they hate brown people and women (and LGBTQ people). They think white men should rule and own all the property and dominate/exploit everybody else. Sometimes they come pretty close to just saying these things. But maybe they also try to justify this childish hatred and greed by making up a lot of complicated theories about the state, the individual, property, capitalism, freedom, etc.
Libertarians want total freedom for themselves. That includes the freedom to use the state against others. A restriction on their ability to use the state is a limitation on their freedom.
An early version of this was the idea that criticism of RW speech violates their freedom of speech.
I recently encountered an interesting taxonomy of freedom by argumate on Tumblr. He argued that the libertarian desire for freedom from excess regulation is a valid aspect of democracy...but only makes up about a third of the whole. Libertarians fall down, he said, by rejecting (as a concept) the idea of passive violence (I own all the water, so you must pay me not to die of dehydration. But I'm not the cause of your suffering) and responsibility to the public (libertarians want not to need democratic permission to take action--that would infringe on their freedom).
"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.”
"Conservatism is one proposition, to wit, there is an ingroup which must be protected but not bound, and an outgroup which must be bound but not protected." -Frank Wilhoit
Libertarians and Fascists agree they THEY are the ones to be protected, the libertarian belief is only applicable to themselves. Others must be subject to the whims of their betters.
For whatever it's worth, there's a subset of libertarians out there that is still highly critical of Trump, and they seem to be an increasingly large percentage of what's left of the vanishing conservative resistance.
If "naked, brutal self-interest" and "a fundamental misrecognition of the Other" (or refusal to recognize the Other) is at the root here--and I agree with you on this--then isn't it a "psychological" explanation? Or doesn't it beg the question of whence such an outlook comes? I get that you're going for a unifying theory to explain the fash + libertarian fusion, and this serves very well. I'm just saying, of the available buckets offered, shouldn't this get dropped in "psychology"?
One of the places I picked up on this from is Thorstein Veblen, Writing around WW1 he noted that the objection to the league of nations was very similar in form and arguments to the objections against regulation of business. Can recognize the paradox of sovereignty which he views as the contradiction between the fundamental liberal principles of "self-help" and "universal rights," the question of how can I use any and all means to protect myself when I am forced to honor other people's rights?
(In a separate book he also argues that the major issue that would cause the fall of the liberal state was the belief that justice would be available for purchase. There's a sort of irony in how that seems to lead people to anarcho-capitalism.)
Thank you for a very interesting text. From my reading of your account of developments in the U.S., the main trend seems to be libertarians turning into fascists. About ten years ago, I wrote my Ph.D. on Chile and Argentina, where the dominant pattern in the 1970s—after the coups in ’73 and ’76—was the opposite. Fascists seized power, while libertarians entered from the sidelines, bringing with them an ideology and a set of tools—neoliberalism—that allowed them to reshape society rather than simply long for the past. In that context, it was the ultraconservative Catholic integralistas, like Jaime Guzmán and Jaime Perriaux, who converted to libertarianism and became the strategists of the military dictatorships. When writing Chile’s 1980 constitution, Jaime Guzmán drew heavily on James Buchanan’s ideas.
Everything in your explanation seems completely right —except I have a quibble with the last part. Americans have a very weak conception of the structure and role of the state but they ricochet between very high expectations of what the state should do for them, and a reluctance to accept their own dependence on the state. These things often come together in the form of an overwhelming feeling of discontent that is sometimes very vague (something is wrong, malaise has set in, the government is at fault that my life is not as I want it to be) and sometimes specific to an absurd degree (egg/gas/housing prices should be lower, everyone should be able to find a job, and anything bad which happens such as a crime or a terrorist attack, should always have been prevented by the government).
That last one might seem explicable even on the most narrow form of the social contract. But it takes the form that bad events should be prevented entirely, which is not terribly realistic. If you don’t have a clear sense of how things happen or why though, you will be likely to accept the idea that it’s some quality of the leader e.g., ‘strength’ or ‘intelligence’ that are essential to preventing the events you don’t want. And that’s how it has been in US politics for some time. The president is assumed to manage the economy, and this is seen as the president’s main job, with an ancillary job of being responsible for the culture. (Running the government seems an afterthought for many.) So if Joe Biden is ‘woke’ this meant that the casting of movies was not to your liking. The nebulousness lends itself to fascism—one wants that special and strong leader. Except our expectations are too high, and too concretely economic. So it’s unlikely to work long term or generate the blind gratitude and loyalty someone like Hoxha could get by telling the Albanians there was a wool surplus.
(The likelihood of discontent unfortunately creates a strong incentive to select both internal and external enemies to palm off the failures on.)
In addition to their high expectations for security, Americans also have very high expectations for personal freedom, though they are also willing to accept bad tradeoffs in the tension between freedom and security, if they think this makes them safer, but someone else less free.
So maybe its the willingness to universalize we’re losing. Possibly when Americans had clearer international foils in the forms of despotic governments elsewhere (plus the certainty all deprived people were elsewhere) we could take pride in the fact that everyone in the US had more freedom, and prosperity than elsewhere. Besides some economic shifts, we don’t have those foils anymore (and capitalists don’t have those threats in the form of international communism). So Americans see themselves more as customers than as citizens, and the reflected pride they had for their good fortune starts to seem a bit tarnished. This also makes Trump’s mode of both lamenting and promising appealing, since he uses that feeling of rivalry with other governments, and the promise of besting them while also warning us that ‘people are laughing at us’ because we are ‘being taken advantage of.’
The connection between libertarianism and fascism has often seemed to me to flow from personal umbrage about the idea of being ruled, even (especially) in the form of demands for cooperation under rules of fairness. The libertarian only offers a potential for mastery of others as a consequence of pure self-rule though. It’s especially attractive for the person who assumes they will be a master of industry. It can’t guarantee one will have mastery over others, since it holds to a certain idea of equality in the form of equal liberty (and assumes the state is always the culprit in restricting liberty). But, as a fantasy, you’re at least spared the indignity of ever being coerced by the democratic choices of others in your society.
How much better then will fascism look to a person attracted to libertarianism for the reason of avoiding any social demand whatsoever. Fascism promise to completely shake off even constraints posed by informal moral cooperation, and non-enforceable expectations of fairness, where people around you expect you to behave as if they also matter. It offers a guarantee of rule over others, which was likely an implicit sweetener for many people attracted to libertarianism who would have to get that by becoming masters of industry. Surely, *they* aren’t the weak who may falter in the absence of government social supports. With fascism, they don’t even have to worry about working to rise to the top—in the fascist fantasy it’s a sure thing you’ll dominate all the people who formerly annoyed you You won’t be free of domination yourself, because you will have a despotic leader you must obey—but the despotic leader is going to institute a kind of permission structure that allows for you and everyone like you to dominate others without even the informal interference of ‘woke scolds, feminist or anti-racist ideas, etc. that threaten to assert you’re a jerk for assuming your subjectivity determines reality, and your wants must be at the center of all interactions
You can see this in Yarvin’s work. He dreams of being ruled by a king, but clearly that king is not going to be a ‘woke’ king, who urges us to be kind, cooperative, and acknowledge the subjectivity of others—i.e., those informal but purely voluntary moral constraints which so intensely bug the shit out of the fascist. (The libertarian does not address since as deniers of the significance of society, they leave all social pressure aside). The ruler re-makes even the private sphere in the mode amenable to those who reject the subjectivity of others, provided they lack the characteristics that the fascist finds revolting.
Probably due to American supremacy since WWII and other well-perused historical reasons, the US was unique in not undertaking - willfully, self-consciously and deliberately, as happened in w. Europe - to build a social democracy with networks of institutions that directly involve citizens in the allocation of resources - the much maligned “nanny state” - which is actually far more resistant to authoritarian collapse than fragmented, clientelistic, “libertarian” societies, in which citizens barely feature except as producers and consumers.
I think it’s too often forgotten that the construction of post-war social democracies was a *willful* process in Europe (and by extension Canada, which was gliding in the UK/Beveridge report wake) - and that even had buy-in from Christian Democrats - and was very self-consciously a political response to the lived experience of Nazi terror, occupation and the deepest recognition of how vulnerable and fragile democracies can be. This can’t be overstated, and was felt at all levels of society.
Seems that some kind of awakening to this profound vulnerability is now happening, but it’s coming from within courtesy of the Trump admin.’s piledriver. (Of course Europe is also now doing some terrible backsliding, but that's another story).
It seems to me that the states didn't have much of a non-pejorative-idiom for Trumpy politics before he came on the scene. "Conservative" conjured bush/romney/church/suit-and-tie types. But there were still a lot of "anti-establishment", conspiratorial young men who hated the libs but were relatively secular and wanted the state not leave stuff they liked alone (weed, maybe abortion). Good chance you call yourself a libertatian if that was the case, even if you don't have particularly strong attachment to e.g., the non-aggression principle or the fountainhead. And then Trump comes on the scene, and he's got what you like about libertarianism without the wackier anti-statism, and you're off to the races. I'm curious to what extent the libertarian-to-hard-right pipeline holds now that more-explicitly-rightist politics are more accessible and less taboo.
I was also thinking about this when I listened to your interview hosted by the Leo Baeck Institute, particularly the discussion of how American fascism would take on American symbols of freedom, apple pie, etc. "Freedom" in the American context has deep roots being used to refer to the right to amass and enjoy property (not incompatible with the hard right), and historically for that "property" to include other people (obviously compatible with the hard right). So it makes sense the American hard right would label themselves libertarians, as you get plausible deniability by equivocating without selling out.
I think another aspect of this is the inherent contradictions in being a conservative opponent of modernity, given that modernity has well and truly triumphed. First, there's the issue that abolishing modernity requires exactly the sort of radicalism that conservatives normally disdain. And second, while Rothbard said he wanted to repeal the 20th century, no one really wants a time machine to 1900. How to have AI and Bitcoin and television and tiktok while also repealing modernity is an unsolved and unsolvable problem, and it leads to embracing other contradictory ideas.
"Reactionary Modernism"
One thing that interwar fascism included was a sense (or just hope) that further development of modernity would eliminate the parts they didn't like. Although there's some of that in discussion of AI now, I think almost everyone on the right has given up these hopes at this point.
I think that's exactly the founding principle for modern tech fascists - it's most blatant with genAI, but 'further development of modernity [eliminating] the parts they [don't] like' is the foundation from Nick Land's hyper-accelerationism on. Democracy, 'wokeness', humanity itself - these are 'bugs' that can and will be 'fixed' by better design and more and 'better' tech
Social conservatism or progressiveness is not the same thing as technological 'conservatism' or 'progress', though it's easy to forget that in the face of so much discourse that assumes otherwise. It's not a contradiction for fascists to venerate the machine while scorning the Enlightenment, because in their view, the Enlightenment was a defect born of early tech that new tech will defeat
I agree that it's not a contradiction to love machines but hate enlightenment values, as you say. But lots of conservatives explicitly venerate pre-modern values, and it is a contradiction to love the Bronze Age but also electric cars.
The conservative ideal is not about being of a particular time, but about being right. Whether due to divine intervention, closer attention to human instinct, or some other factor, conservatives believe we reached a moral apex a long time ago. Technological progress is cumulative; moral progress is just about matching an already-known ideal.
On the one hand, you could just chalk this up to Eco's 'Ur-Fascism' contention that the first attribute of it is irreconcilable syncretism. But I think an undercurrent of it is that, by embracing our roles as 'the technological creature', we will conversely lead ourselves back to the righteous state of nature - what members of Devo, in their earliest writings, called 'reaching the ideal state of Fred Flintstone: the technologically advanced caveman'
I think 'the Two Modernities' is an under-explored topic in general
Here is at least one place that the fundamentalists come in. Although they have a reputation for being anti-science, there are other ways in which they have a strong affinity for technological development. I recall a book I read late in grad school that referred to them as "rational progressive primitivists".
The immediate ancestors of fundamentalist churches staked out their ground on a semi-Lockean Watchmaker-constructed universe, not especially unlike the Deist conception, and were opposed to subjectivist philosophies like Romanticism. They expected to be at the forefront of science, only to be blindsided by Darwin and never recover. Their anti-modernism is *entirely* out of frustration; they believed the world was and should be rationally explainable because it was rationally constructed.
Keep an eye out for fundamentalists embracing simulationism.
Just curious who you’re thinking about here. The Calvinists?
Not primarily (and this will be complicated). The creedal conservative churches of early America are not direct ancestors of fundamentalism, though most have fundamentalist branches now. The primary group I'm thinking of stems from the Radical Reformation churches, such as the Anabaptists. (The Amish are an anomalous throwback.)
Radical Reformation churches appealed directly to the Bible for authority to counter the Catholic priesthood. They believed that the Bible produced the church, rather than the other way round. While that might not seem like promising ground for empiricism, most held that God's revelation could be found in *two* "books", and the other was the "book of nature". Both books had to be studied exactingly and rationally to reveal God's will. Moreover, it meant that the priestly and aristocratic hierarchies had no rightful authority and should be pulled down. The motto of the Hussites, the earliest group of which we have definite records, was "the Law of Christ is sufficient". Radical Reform churches usually ended up supporting democracy, but as a half-measure toward the abolition of government. Over time the teachings of Radical churches were usually watered down by repeated failures.
The largest Radical Reformation group in America at the time of the Revolution were the Baptists, although these were highly doctrinally modified by that point. There were also some smaller groups such as the Haldanes--Michael Faraday was a Haldane. However, the Second Great Awakening produced a new wave of RR churches, beginning with the Campbell-Stone Restoration Movement. Radical ideas also spread into creedal-conservative churches to produce their fundamentalist wings. For reasons I don't fully understand, these new churches were much less attached to socialism and gave it up after the failed experiments of the 1840s. They were *initially* anti-authoritarian, supporting open discussion and dissent. They were also prone to science-fictional sounding doctrines such as belief in life on other planets. Over time, nearly all of them have curdled, with increasingly rigid doctrines and "moderator" positions becoming priestly-bureaucratic (the Watchtower Society, which was once an open forum for discussion, is a good example). It's hard to say how much of this is inherent and how much is a reaction to the collapse of watchmaker-style empiricism. Nonetheless, it should remind you strongly of Less Wrong.
So, a partial accounting: some but not all Baptist churches, non-charismatic nondenominational evangelical churches, the Churches of Christ and the Christian Churches, and most of the "weird" American churches (such as Jehovah's Witnesses and LDS), as well as most non-charismatic fundamentalist branches of other churches. There are also a small number of "imported" but relatively pure-strain Radicals, such as the Moravians and Mennonites. These tend to be more interested in democratic socialism.
Thank you! I have SO many questions but to avoid bombarding you what did you mean about ‘Less Wrong’? Very curious.
From my knowledge of tge rhetoric of these movements, I suspect they gathered the same general sort of person attracted by Yudkowski. Thry emphasized that reason is a natural human capacity but one that can be trained, and if you want to develop yours why not come study with us? In practice, for whatever reason, they developed the same sort of rigid orthodoxy about esoteric points and libertarian attitude.
AH! I was just trying figure out what happened to the Diggers and the Ranters, and whether they morphed into anything here in the US.
I can’t quite find out.
As much as I love debating esoteric points, I’m more a fan of the Quakers or John Wesley when it comes to my sects. If you’re going to do estotericism in religion, I’d prefer a Nagarjuna or a Averroes or a Hans Kung —don’t muddle it into your doctrine and create conflicts and splinter sects.
It's actually kind of strange how Ayn Rand was cited as an influence on the Tea Party movement but is hardly mentioned now, despite how much the current crisis is a Bizarro funhouse mirror of the endgame of Atlas Shrugged.
In the book the evil collectivists running the government order all private companies to freeze hiring and production, in a boneheaded move to make the economy stay good. This triggers a resource and infrastructure crisis throughout the country, and so the government kidnaps über-creator John Galt and tortures him to try to coerce him into 'becoming a dictator' to fix their problems. After the captains of industry rescue Galt, they let the entire country consume itself in self-destruction before they, the creative, productive survivors, plan to build a new world over the graveyard of the old.
It's ludicrous but kind of campy fun as a read, but now has a sinister air of projection, like the story is being told by an unreliable narrator, and in doing so clarifies the mindset at work in the libertarian-to-fascism pipeline.
Rand is simply too unpopular to get much attention now. Non-libertarians find her loathsome and unreadable, while most of her hardcore "objectivist" followers refused to consider themselves libertarians. Where her influence still exists, it's simply left unspoken most of the time.
The Galt torture scene is very obviously a pastiche of O'Brien torturing Winston, with the distinction that doublethink is incapable of working in practice; the O'Brien figure cannot really reject science and still keep his machines functional. Libertarians genuinely do not see any difference between the fascist state and thr communist one, other than a few policy details; both are "armed gangs out to dominate the people" to paraphrase Rand.
Rothbard’s discussion of the Italian free-market economists is missing some Italy-specific features of corporate industrialization, which was always dependent on state largesse, a system of patronage and “clientelismo” combined with tariff-driven mercantilism, and being totally unrelated to any integrated national concept of obligations, responsibilities, or even a formal legal or constitutional structure. This was sometimes referred to as “ministerialismo” going back to the fascist period and on through afterwards - corporate heads using state roles as transactional vectors, independent of the state as a juridical or social policy structure of democratic interchange. This is why the actual *political* nature of the state was irrelevant to them - democratic, fascist, monarchist, whatever, it didn’t matter, they could work with them all, as long as the system of clientelism remained untouched.
How do you think this changes the discussion?
Mostly I think it’s just some context that actually reinforces your point that “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’”, and, “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.”
The point I was trying to emphasize is that underlying these ideas, in the Italian context, is basically the result of a *failed* national project - it’s the historical *absence* of the state as anything other than a middle-man of convenience, a patronage mechanism (and occasionally a muscle-flexing labour suppression tool) that - on the surface paradoxically perhaps - created the conditions for the totalitarian model (needless to say, in many ways it’s just the mafia model of governance by a combination of threats and patronage, whose endurance to this day has always been premised on the absence or failure of anything resembling a functional, juridical state.)
Fascist corporatists would find themselves very comfortable, I think, in modern Singapore, where one of the tech tycoon “Network State” ideologues, Balaji Srinivasan, has renounced his US citizenship and decamped to. A one-party state on a totally corporatist model with CEOs and gov’t ministers in a perpetual revolving door. The state as the absence of the state.
I agree with the main thrust of the article (unless I misread you) that a desire for domination - particularly personally exercised domination in fascism's sadistic style - is key to understanding the connective tissue between Rothbardian libertarians and fascism. I think part of the problem is that Adorno's contribution to The Authoritarian Personality, namely the F-Scale, has warped our thinking on what 'authoritarianism' actually is. Two of Adorno's specifications "Conventionalism: conformity to the traditional societal norms and values of the middle class" & "Authoritarian submission: a passive notion towards adhering to conventional norms and values" are real "cuckservatism" from a modern American far-right perspective (and indeed from the original Nazis and Fascisti, truth be told). The Rothbardian libertarian sees the unregulated free market as a means by which the human inequality and racial hierarchies they believe divide humanity can be reestablished. They celebrate the market because it creates inequality, which they see as validating their supremacist views, be they masculinist, ethnic or racial. Or at least it would - so they believe - if the woke regime would stop interfering in the proper operation of the market to redistribute income to the weak and those that natural selection would otherwise be pruning from the tree of humanity. Social Darwinism is the ideological linkage, and rage and ressentiment and the desire to validate the ego through the personal sovereignty of sadistic domination over those they see as unworthy, is the social psychological side of the coin
I have been trying to study some very early manifestations of libertarianism, such as that instantiated by David Lipscomb, and I tend to think that if the state they believe is repressing them is truly so different from the bourgeois state that socialists believe repressed the workers, the cause is a failure to distinguish clearly what anyone means by "state". That is, a great many people of low to moderate education (and perhaps some well-educated but highly specialized people) have only a muddled conception of "the government which tells us what to do and for which we occasionally vote"--not just conservatives, but also liberals and leftists, if perhaps in smaller numbers.
I say this because Lipscombian libertarianism, and possibly other "paleo" varieties, seems to have developed from the disappointments of American experiments with utopian or anarcho-socialism, in which the predecessors of modern fundamentalist churches participated between 1840 and 1880. All these societies failed, apparently spontaneously, and subsequently the churches that had supported them turned well to the right--but without substantially changing their perspective on government.
Lipscomb's treatment of government is highly theological, but this passage from "On Civil Government" sums up his secular-ish critique: "Every human government uses the substance, the time, the service of the subjects to enrich, gratify the appetites and lusts, and to promote the grandeur and glory of the rulers. And it is not true that in democratic or any other kind of governments the people themselves are rulers. They choose the rulers, at the instigation of a few interested leaders, then these rulers rule for their own selfish good and glory as other rulers do."
Just a quick off-topic note: In case anyone missed this, John's book got a quasi-favorable review here: https://www.phenomenalworld.org/reviews/back-to-the-90s/ -- This is the Phenomenal World site, dated Oct 3, 2024. The site deals with matters of interest to social scientists with, it seems to me, a heavy weight on economics.
Yeah I liked it okay, but it wasn't correct about what my book said
I figured. When your paperback comes out (later this year?) I hope you can write an essay addressing the misinterpretations because I think the whole topic is very important and it would be useful to those of us grappling with things to have the kinks ironed out in a ready roundup.
Way too much insider baseball intellectual history to get my head fully around but absolutely fascinating discussion; including all your commenters. First stab at a public high school social studies classroom synopsis: Democracy breeds libertarianism and under most normal circumstances is grist for the mill of civilization and culture; a loyal opposition, just another dissonant voice in the raucous chorus of democracy. But in crisis circumstances, say, a global pandemic, world war, terrible economic downturns and/or some other form of widespread social depravation, libertarianism can fuse with fascism as a desperate bid to end democracy and politics; to end having to negotiate a world with others, to end gridlock and social dysfunction. Its promise is elite rule and total technological automation; its outcomes extremely rigid forms of social inequality and violent authority.
Amazing piece. I'm reminded of Richard Landes's essay on the Melian Dialogue and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in The Paranoid Apocalypse, a hundred-year retrospective on the latter.
"In any case, the voice of the Elders was not a recognizably Jewish voice. But it was familiar. Indeed it was a common voice, even a cacophony of voices. It was Socrates's foe in Book II of the Republic, Thrasymachus arguing "might makes right." It was the Athenians' to the Melians according to Thucydides. It was libido dominandi, invoked favorably by the Romans and, even as he deplored it, accepted by Augustine as an immutable dimension of political life. It was the voice of Carolingian lords and clergymen as they hewed their way through tribal Europe; it was the voice of the German aristocracy in the century before the Peasants' War of 1524, when they argued that private warfare - that is, their rampages - were good for public peace because they "pruned back" the troublesome peasantry. It was the voice of Machiavelli in his advice to the Prince. It was the voice of Bismarck. In a more civil form, it has a school in modern academies called "realism.""
Landes argued that, while it was obviously not to the exclusion of antisemitic content for its own sake, another function of the Protocols was to voice the "classical realist's" way of coping with the democratization of the world (and it was, of course, a plagiarism and systematic perversion of a pro-democratic satire on Napoleon III). If everyone is ruled - psychologically, politically - by the libido dominandi, you can't possibly accept that this is a good faith experiment in universal freedom, so what is it?
When libertarians/fascists cite all these theorists, maybe they are just window-dressing a very simple thing: they hate brown people and women (and LGBTQ people). They think white men should rule and own all the property and dominate/exploit everybody else. Sometimes they come pretty close to just saying these things. But maybe they also try to justify this childish hatred and greed by making up a lot of complicated theories about the state, the individual, property, capitalism, freedom, etc.
Libertarians want total freedom for themselves. That includes the freedom to use the state against others. A restriction on their ability to use the state is a limitation on their freedom.
An early version of this was the idea that criticism of RW speech violates their freedom of speech.
I recently encountered an interesting taxonomy of freedom by argumate on Tumblr. He argued that the libertarian desire for freedom from excess regulation is a valid aspect of democracy...but only makes up about a third of the whole. Libertarians fall down, he said, by rejecting (as a concept) the idea of passive violence (I own all the water, so you must pay me not to die of dehydration. But I'm not the cause of your suffering) and responsibility to the public (libertarians want not to need democratic permission to take action--that would infringe on their freedom).
"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.”
"Conservatism is one proposition, to wit, there is an ingroup which must be protected but not bound, and an outgroup which must be bound but not protected." -Frank Wilhoit
Libertarians and Fascists agree they THEY are the ones to be protected, the libertarian belief is only applicable to themselves. Others must be subject to the whims of their betters.
For whatever it's worth, there's a subset of libertarians out there that is still highly critical of Trump, and they seem to be an increasingly large percentage of what's left of the vanishing conservative resistance.
If "naked, brutal self-interest" and "a fundamental misrecognition of the Other" (or refusal to recognize the Other) is at the root here--and I agree with you on this--then isn't it a "psychological" explanation? Or doesn't it beg the question of whence such an outlook comes? I get that you're going for a unifying theory to explain the fash + libertarian fusion, and this serves very well. I'm just saying, of the available buckets offered, shouldn't this get dropped in "psychology"?
I think it's more like a transcendental principle, prior to psychology
One of the places I picked up on this from is Thorstein Veblen, Writing around WW1 he noted that the objection to the league of nations was very similar in form and arguments to the objections against regulation of business. Can recognize the paradox of sovereignty which he views as the contradiction between the fundamental liberal principles of "self-help" and "universal rights," the question of how can I use any and all means to protect myself when I am forced to honor other people's rights?
(In a separate book he also argues that the major issue that would cause the fall of the liberal state was the belief that justice would be available for purchase. There's a sort of irony in how that seems to lead people to anarcho-capitalism.)
Thank you for a very interesting text. From my reading of your account of developments in the U.S., the main trend seems to be libertarians turning into fascists. About ten years ago, I wrote my Ph.D. on Chile and Argentina, where the dominant pattern in the 1970s—after the coups in ’73 and ’76—was the opposite. Fascists seized power, while libertarians entered from the sidelines, bringing with them an ideology and a set of tools—neoliberalism—that allowed them to reshape society rather than simply long for the past. In that context, it was the ultraconservative Catholic integralistas, like Jaime Guzmán and Jaime Perriaux, who converted to libertarianism and became the strategists of the military dictatorships. When writing Chile’s 1980 constitution, Jaime Guzmán drew heavily on James Buchanan’s ideas.