The past year I’ve watched as many of the “libertarian” friends I’ve made since 2015 online have all started digging deeper and deeper into the culture war. More alarming to me than that was how many of them started labeling themselves as right wingers.
On its face it really shouldn’t bother me since I have in a tongue in cheek sense always classified myself as a leftist. For me this was always my way to signal where my origins were. Some of my friends have always referred to themselves as conservative libertarians. With these people little has changed.
It’s the black flag guys turning into Christian zealots ready to wield whatever power they can muster to “protect themselves“ that concerns me. Agorists that discovered Curtis Yarvin and James Burnham and suddenly realize power is important. Amusingly I feel as though, in many ways, these people are finally joining me in some of the questions that I have always grappled with.
Self preservation and the nature of power being important concerns. They are not however the only concerns and when I look into my own soul I think they are not the most important. The most important are always moral questions, which is what Anarchism always was to me. It was a religion that I could plug in where I no longer had faith. I won’t deny this. Modern political winds have done nothing to bring my faith back either.
Self preservation and the nature/expression of power is what brings me back to my initial premise. The left and right is nonsense. If you see either of these entities as having power then You were a terrible anarchist and at best a mediocre Hoppean. I say this because as much as some of these people talk about time horizons they tend to get bogged down into small windows like elections. They see a pendulum swinging left and right whereas I see a train headed one direction with weight shifting from one rail to the other never quite enough to derail it. Did we suddenly forget the dialectic? Do we all now believe that maybe Tom Woods 3x5 card is too big?
I believe the rightward swing we are about to see in America as a rebuttal to the excesses of the left is going to bring horrible side effects for anyone who professes to care about liberty. Especially if say you’re an LGBTQ person like myself. In their effort to prevent the left from gaining control again they are going to usher in the technocratic state as a means of monitoring the undesirable thinkers. Especially since its just a regression. That’s why the LP and the Mises people fight so damned much. They represent the dialectic scaring libertarians to different sides.
You can say that libertarianism has done almost nothing to make your life freer and that the masses will never be swayed. But consider this:
Rothbard mused that there were something like 7 libertarians in the 70s,.
The progressive path we are currently on has taken since the 1800s to achieve what it has.
I’m not saying that sometimes the best choice in battle isn’t live to fight another day. I’m not arguing that power isn’t important. I’m arguing that what anarchists have always known is that the parties are a control system and there is a moral way to interact as people. Make piles of money. Be a paragon to follow. But neither Christ nor Anarchism allows you to put power as number one.