Really, What the Hell Is a ‘Libertarian Authoritarian’?

In a review of Offended Freedom: The Rise of Libertarian Authoritarianism, Reason’s Brian Doherty summarizes the book’s topic as “people formerly of the left, who ‘were once committed to an emancipatory transformation of the existing order,’ who have pivoted to hostility toward openness to foreigners and the wider world and to anger at what presents as scientific authority.”

Dismissing the term as a contradiction in terms, he asks “What the Hell Is a ‘Libertarian Authoritarian’?” 

Let’s see if I can help out.

First of all, there’s Doherty himself, who has repeatedly shilled for corporate-owned “charter cities” built on former peasant land stolen by a military coup regime.

Aside from him, there’s an entire milieu of self-identified “libertarians” whose views are characterized mainly by “hostility toward openness to foreigners and the wider world and to anger at what presents as scientific authority.” For starters, that describes about nine-tenths of the commenters under Reason articles.

There’s also Argentina’s Javier Milei, widely celebrated as a “libertarian” in publications like Reason, whose authoritarianism I recently examined.

There’s Walter Block, who has repeatedly vouched for the libertarian character of “voluntary slavery” over the course of his career.

And then there’s the entire paleolibertarian movement, which can be described with little exaggeration as having grown into a giant festering sore with the withered cadaver of the historic libertarian movement attached. Going back to the 90s, we find right-libertarian and ancap demigod Murray Rothbard who, in his paleo phase, anticipated Donald Trump with this:

Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals. And by this I mean, of course, not “white collar criminals” or “inside traders” but violent street criminals-robbers, muggers, rapists, murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of course to liability when they are in error.

Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the Bums. Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares? Hopefully, they will disappear, that is, move from the ranks of the petted and cosseted bum class to the ranks of the productive members of society.

Along with the late Rothbard, the paleo community includes its gray eminence Hans Hermann Hoppe, Lew Rockwell and the hangers-on at LRC, and the Mises Caucus which staged a hostile tiktok.com/takeover of the Libertarian National Committee and a number of state organizations including the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire — whose Twitter account posted: “Anyone who celebrates Juneteenth should be deported from America.”

In addition to gross mismanagement and incompetence, former LNC Chair Angela McArdle is famous for welcoming Holocaust deniers as “fellow truth seekers” and paraphrasing the notorious 14 Words in a tweet. Joshua Smith, also formerly of the Libertarian National Committee, called for the repeal of the 19th amendment.

Hoppe and his disciples are social authoritarians whose ideal society is a neo-feudal one of 100% private appropriation of land, with social models including Hoppe’s affinity for monarchy and Gary North’s Calvinist theocracy (although most of them seek to construct their ideal authoritarian society by means at least nominally consistent with the non-aggression principle). They desire a hierarchical society dominated by landlords, in which everyone not a land owner is a tenant or a wage laborer, and treat “time preference” — a concept itself which is questionable — as a character trait in language that borders on the eugenic or racist. E.g.:

We now live in a country where a huge portion of its inhabitants are High Time Preference Peoples, and they couldn’t give a damn about cleanliness, virtue, respectability, ethics, or neighborly concerns. All they care about is: What can I get for me today that will make me feel good instantly? 

The paleos are notable for howling about “open borders,” and Hoppe (depicted here with a helicopter, in a playful allusion to the Pinochet dictatorship) has called for the “physical removal” of those whose views and cultures are incompatible with an (ahem) “libertarian” society. The LPNH, very much on the same page, tweeted: “Degenerates must be expelled in order to maintain a libertarian social order.” The paleos, finally, far from limiting themselves to a civil libertarian critique of lockdown mandates, went whole hog in promoting anti-mask and anti-vaxx batshittery.

Given the ascendancy of these views over much of the legacy libertarian movement, the following passage by Doherty rings a bit hollow:

The authoritarians the authors study — those angry at more open immigration — are not at all libertarian….

The authors have found a genuinely interesting phenomenon — people formerly of the left, who “were once committed to an emancipatory transformation of the existing order,” who have pivoted to hostility toward openness to foreigners and the wider world and to anger at what presents as scientific authority.

Reason itself devotes considerable resources to promoting right-wing culture war narratives. Aside from Robby Soave and Nick Gillespie constantly pissing and moaning about “cancel culture” and “woke mobs,” the themes of Soave’s writing almost entirely echo the fetid fever swamp of Quillette, Steven Pinker, Bari Weiss, and the rest of the so-called Intellectual Dark Web.

It is true that a significant part of the libertarian movement continues not to identify with the cultural right, in the sense of embracing its anti-abortion and anti-LGBT politics. Nevertheless, even “socially liberal” economic right-libertarians mostly defend “natural social hierarchies” in the economic realm, and have done so at least since Rothbard banished Karl Hess from Libertarian Forum and the Kochtopus began its Long March through libertarian institutions.

The overwhelming tendency on the libertarian right — not just op-eds in major movement periodicals, but in a whole ecosystem of right-libertarian blogs, blog comments, message boards, email lists, and podcasts with audiences large and small — has been, for a generation and more, whenever commenting on a dispute between employer and worker, or between landlord and tenant, to reflexively take the side of the employer or landlord. Although right-libertarians sometimes handwave that their support is for free markets and not business or the rich, and not for the existing economic system to the extent that it’s characterized by “crony capitalism,” their default is almost always to Vulgar Libertarianism: defending the rich as “job creators,” business profits as the just reward for value creation, and global corporate capitalism as “the free market.” In the words of Cool Hand Luke, “them pore ole bosses need all the help they can get.”

In short, libertarian authoritarians comprise, to some extent, the entire libertarian right. Hope this helps, Brian.

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative