Re: [A-List] US Domestic Political Disputes

["Anne Williamson" <annewilliamson@xxxxxxx>]

I've really enjoyed Michael's posts on UK politics (Labor,
Blair, punk Thatcherites, Ian McKinnon - all of it), and
though I'm not well enough versed in the personalities and
the contemporary British scene to appreciate those posts in
full (and I'm even - gasp! - a subscriber to The Spectator;
I know, I know - Quel horreur!), I still profit from what I am
able to absorb.

I thought perhaps some readers of this list might similarly
enjoy reading some vigorous commentary on one of the US right's
internecine quarrels, and so the below post.  (Calling it a "quarrel"
really isn't correct - it's a split if ever there was.)

What strikes me is that nobody's happy these days politically, except
maybe the neo-cons (but not on the days when DUH-bya kinda, sorta
thinks maybe the Israelis oughta take a break from killing Palestinians)
and the wildly free-spending US Congress.

I really worry about how all this misery, disappointment and aggression will
shake itself out.

Anyway, here's a cri de coeur from a paleolibertarian (anarcho-capitalist),
I could have written myself.

Anne

*************************************************************
Behind the Headlines
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
May 3, 2002

LONG LIVE LIBERTARIANISM!

We haven't 'fallen' - only the sell-outs have stumbled

Today's Wall Street Journal [May 2] proclaims, with a flourish of editorial
trumpets, "The Fall of the Libertarians." The cause of the movement's
alleged demise? 9/11. Oh yes, "everything's changed" since that awful day,
including the possibility of getting Big Government off our backs:

"The great free-market revolution that began with the coming to power of
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at the close of the 1970s has finally
reached its Thermidor, or point of reversal."

THE END OF 'THE END OF HISTORY'

The great irony of this exceedingly odd little screed is that it was written
by someone whose philosophy most definitely bit the dust on 9/11: Francis
Fukuyama's "the end of history" thesis was blown to smithereens along with
the World Trade Center and lost amid the smoking rubble on that fateful day.
In essence, the central argument of his famous article, published in the
summer of 1989, is summarized in a single sentence:

"What we may be witnessing in not just the end of the Cold War, or the
passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history
as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government."

While he was careful to note that "the victory of liberalism has occurred
primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in
the real or material world," this qualification only underscores the
colossal scale of Fukuyama's error. For it seems no one informed the 9/11
hijackers of this alleged "victory" over their consciousness. Their terrible
act was a dramatic (and unanswerable) refutation of Fukuyama's deterministic
evolutionism. Yet now this recycled neoconservative has-been is being
dragged out in the service of - what? War, naturally, the chief
preoccupation and joy of every neocon.

WARMED-OVER HEGELIANISM

Set down as the Soviet empire was tottering into oblivion, Fukuyama's
warmed-over Hegelianism soon became the favorite intellectual cliché of
Marxists-turned-neocons from Commentary to National Review. Fukuyama's giddy
triumphalism provided a fitting backdrop for the unabashedly neo-imperialist
flights of fancy indulged in by the post-cold war, post-9/11 neoconservative
right. Bill Kristol's clarion call for "benevolent global hegemony" and
National Review's crazed campaign demanding that George W. Bush invade and
occupy the Saudi oil fields come immediately to mind. As neocon columnist
Charles Krauthammer proclaimed in the pages of The National Interest [Winter
1989-90]:

"The goal is the world as described by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama's
provocation was to assume that the end [of history] - what he calls the
common marketization of the world - is either here or inevitably dawning; it
is neither. The West has to make it happen. It has to wish and work for a
super-sovereign West economically, culturally, and politically hegemonic in
the world."

The triumph of the liberal values supposedly represented by the US
government is inevitable, according to Fukuyama, but, just in case it isn't,
Krauthammer and his fellow neocons want to use the American military to
"make it happen." Like Marx, who also posited the inevitable victory of his
adherents, Fukyama is more than willing to go along with this. Fukuyama
recently signed on along with a passel of neocon intellectuals to a call
issued by the Project for a New American Century calling for the outright
invasion and military occupation of large swatches of the Middle East.

FUKUYAMA VERSUS THE LIBERTARIANS

Libertarianism is an obstacle to Empire, and, as such, must be removed:
conservatism, says Fukuyama in the War Street Journal, has "matured," and
it's time to cast away the youthful chrysalis of libertarianism:

"Like the French Revolution, it derived its energy from a simple idea of
liberty, to wit, that the modern welfare state had grown too large, and that
individuals were excessively regulated."

To begin with, it is absurd to identify the free-market "revolution" that
supposedly triumphed in the 1980s with the electoral victories of either
Thatcher or Reagan, since neither reduced the size, scope, or arrogant
presumptiveness of government power, but only - at best - momentarily slowed
the rate of increase. And I would argue that Reagan, in pursuing a military
build-up unprecedented in our history, did more to increase the power of the
public sector than any other President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But then this confusion on Fukuyama's part is unremarkable in someone who
sees libertarianism embodied in the complaint that "the modern welfare state
had grown too large." Libertarians abhor the day the welfare state was
spawned, and have called for its complete abolition ever since. As for
Americans being "excessively regulated," it is not the degree but the
presumption that regulation is required that libertarians have always
contested.

RED RHETORIC

"Yet the revolution entered a Jacobin phase with the election of Newt
Gingrich's Congress in 1994," Fukuyama continues - hey, wait a minute! This
guy is supposed to be a (neo)conservative, I know, but how come he writes as
if he were Leon Trotsky? His prose is chockfull of references right out of
some Trotskyist tract: "Thermidor" (Trotsky's term for what called the
"degeneration" of the Soviet "workers state"), "Jacobins," and comparing the
conservative-libertarian ascendancy to the French Revolution. What is this -
the Wall Street Journal or the Socialist Worker? With Fukuyama and his
neocon fan club, it's often hard to tell.

LIBERTARIAN 'JACOBINS'?

Okay, so this "Jacobin" phase of the alleged free-market revolution,
according to Fukuyama, went too far, allowing the Clintonites to seize the
vital center. "For many on the right," he avers,

"Mr. Reagan's classical liberalism began to evolve into libertarianism, an
ideological hostility to the state in all its manifestations. While the
dividing line between the two is not always straightforward, libertarianism
is a far more radical dogma whose limitations are becoming increasingly
clear. The libertarian wing of the revolution overreached itself, and is now
fighting rearguard actions on two fronts: foreign policy and biotechnology."

Well, he's right about one thing: libertarianism, while most emphatically
not a "dogma," is indeed radical, in that its critique of the status quo
strikes at the very root of the evil that besets us, which is the State. If
Reaganism represents "classical liberalism," in any sense, then perhaps
Fukuyama means classical liberalism at the end of its tether, after a long
decline into utilitarianism and gradualism. In any case, Fukuyama's
conflation of Reaganism and libertarianism is interesting only because it
prefaces the real point of his piece:

"The hostility of libertarians to big government extended to U.S.
involvement in the world. The Cato Institute propounded isolationism in the
'90s, on the ground that global leadership was too expensive. At the time of
the Gulf War, Cato produced an analysis that argued it would be cheaper to
let Saddam keep Kuwait than to pay for a military intervention to expel
him--a fine cost-benefit analysis, if you only abstracted from the problem
of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a megalomaniac."

Of course, the reality is that Saddam and Kuwait have kissed and made up,
forming a common front, along with the Saudis, against the US. So it turns
out that it would indeed have been cheaper - in terms of lives, both
American and Iraqi, as well as dollars - to let Saddam keep Kuwait after
all. As for weapons of mass destruction being in the hands of a Middle
Eastern megalomaniac, I, too, am disturbed that Ariel Sharon has his finger
on the nuclear trigger, but are we going to blame the Iraqis for that, too?

So there was the "isolationist" (i.e. pro-peace) Cato Institute, daring to
question Washington's pro-war consensus. Ah, but then along came 9/11, when
"everything changed" - and the rug was ostensibly pulled out from under the
libertarians:

"Contrary to Mr. Reagan's vision of the U.S. as a 'shining city on a hill,'
libertarians saw no larger meaning in America's global role, no reason to
promote democracy and freedom abroad. Sept. 11 ended this line of argument.
It was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to
tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only
the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on
to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen
passengers at airports."

Oh, thank God for the US government! They did a great job of screening, now
didn't they? Why, if not for them, the 9/11 hijackers would've wriggled
through our security nets and managed to smuggle weapons aboard four
aircraft, hijack the planes, and ram them into the - hey, uh, hold on there,
correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't something terrible happen that day in
spite of all the warnings, all the precautions, all the "anti-terrorist"
task forces and government studies, all the billions poured into "security"?
It's pathetic, really, that the neocons are now imitating the Daschle
Democrats in proclaiming that big government, post-9/11, is back in style.
Good lord, we may not have reached the end of history, but surely we have
reached the end of our patience with Fukuyama's sloppy polemic. What makes
it interesting to begin with, however, is that this attack on the Cato
Institute is completely gratuitous.

True, the Cato folks were once committed to the cause of noninterventionism,
because they, like all authentic libertarians, know that war is the health
of the state, as Randolph Bourne famously put it. The centralizing effect of
military priorities in wartime, the comprehensiveness of state controls for
the duration of the conflict, necessarily shrinks the sphere of liberty and
increases the role and reach of government. Even more importantly, just as
libertarians oppose the consolidation and expansion of the public sector at
home, so they must logically oppose its geographical extension abroad. This
view was held by Murray N. Rothbard, the real intellectual founder of the
Cato Institute, and advocated in one form or another by Cato (in spite of
their break with Rothbard in the early 1980s) up until 9/11.

CATO SELLS OUT

In the post-9/11 atmosphere, however, this principled opposition to
warmongering - dubbed "isolationism" by Fukuyama - is understood to be
"anti-Americanism" of the worst sort, and has been explicitly disavowed by
Cato. As I pointed out in a previous column, their representatives now have
set themselves in the vanguard of the War Party, with Cato foreign policy
honcho Ted Galen Carpenter calling for the invasion of Pakistan (!) and Cato
coming out in favor of Bush's endless "war on terrorism." Carpenter has even
gone so far as to jump on the "Let Sharon be Sharon" bandwagon, urging
"nonintervention" by opposing US pressure on Israel to stop slaughtering the
Palestinians. But intervention in the form of US tax dollars filling Israeli
coffers as Israeli tanks roll over the Palestinians - for some reason this
form of intervention goes unmentioned by Cato's chief foreign policy
"expert." But all that backtracking and neocon ass-kissing, in the end,
didn't get them anything but an attack in the Wall Street Journal - and a
particularly galling one, at least from the pro-war "libertarian"
perspective.

LIBERTARIAN CLONES FOR WAR

For the one big crusade of the Virginia Postrel-Glenn Reynolds-Warblogger
axis of cyber-evil has been the legalization of cloning; on their endless
little "blogs," calls to nuke Mecca and replace the House of Saud with the
International House of Pancakes are interspersed between earnest little
petitions for the legalization of cloning, which will supposedly usher in a
golden age. To Fukuyama and his fellow neocons, this is monstrous, and must
be stopped, while the pro-war libertarians are ready to make the first
scientist prosecuted for illegal cloning their very own Mumia Abu Jamal.

Without taking a position on cloning one way or the other, it is interesting
to note that the neocons wouldn't cut their "libertarian" satellites any
slack, not even on this somewhat abstruse issue. It didn't matter that
Postrel and her little blogger kids kowtowed on the all-important foreign
policy question. Not even running interference for Sharon's blitzkrieg was
enough to earn them sufficient brownie points for any kind of exemption. Any
deviation from the neocon line is the occasion for a denunciation, a
reminder of who is on what end of the leash.

The pro-war libertarians thought that, if only they allowed themselves to be
properly domesticated, if only they bought into the globalist foreign policy
agenda of the neocons, and stuck to economics and exotica like cloning and
drug legalization, they would be left alone in peace. Let this be a lesson
to them - not that they can afford to learn it, as this point. I am reminded
of what Murray N. Rothbard said of the Catoites back in the 1980s, when they
were trying to pass off libertarianism as "low-tax liberalism": "They have
sold out for a mess of pottage," he wrote, "without even getting the pottage
in return."

DEVELOPING A TASTE FOR THE LASH

Fukuyama is right to herald the fall of the pro-war libertarians: they have
corralled themselves into a tiny and rather unrewarding ideological niche,
where individualism is conflated with a narcissism so overweening that the
Postrelian embrace of cloning issue seems almost too parodic to be true.
Relegated to the fringe, the "libertarian" branch of the War Party will be
allowed to feed off crumbs from the neocons' ample table only as long as
they keep quiet about their more unconventional ideas. Okay, drug
legalization, well, maybe that's okay, since even Bill Buckley agrees with
them: but cloning? No way. It was time for them to feel the editorial lash,
time to let them know who's the dominant force in this coalition: but they
shouldn't despair. The lash may sting the first couple of times, but they'll
get used to it after a while - and may even come to like it.

Indeed, such masochistic tendencies are obvious in Cato "scholar" Brink
Lindsay's craven reply to Fukuyama. As the number one critic of those
libertarians who have retained their opposition to empire-building
interventionism, Lindsay loudly protests his loyalty to the War Party and
even distances himself from his employer:

"Yes, it's true that some libertarians, including folks at the Cato
Institute, opposed the Gulf War. But I'm a libertarian, I support cloning,
and my only complaint with the Gulf War is that we didn't take Baghdad.
Virginia Postrel, far and away the most prominent libertarian on the cloning
issue, supported the Gulf War.. Many prominent libertarians have been front
and center in urging vigorous and aggressive military action"

Yes, Brink, why don't you crawl on your belly all the way over to Bill
Kristol's doorstep? Maybe that will do some good. Or maybe you can make your
argument for cloning in terms of the US acquiring an invaluable military
asset. Imagine cloned American soldiers, genetically-designed warriors ready
to fight practically from birth: why, we could win the war on terrorism, and
even conquer the whole world, given such bioengineered Myrmidons! Surely
such a prospect could go a long way toward helping us achieve Bill Kristol's
dream of "benevolent world hegemony."

CLONING AND THE PROMISED LAND

Another way to appeal to a neocon audience is to show how cloning will
benefit Israel. And of course the benefits to the Israelis are glaringly
obvious. Instead of trying to convince the Diaspora to move to one of the
most dangerous places on earth, a socialist Sparta where the government
takes more than half your income, the Israelis could solve their demographic
problem by simply cloning new citizens - more than enough to populate the
Greater Israel of Sharon's dreams.

It's sickening, really, to contemplate the self-abasement of these
social-climbing careerists, whose degenerate "libertarianism" is but a
distorted shadow, a caricature of the real thing: and they aren't worth
contemplating, really, except as a lesson and a warning to the young. This
is what you turn into when you sell out: as Rothbard put it, "and they
didn't even get the pottage!" The fall of the pro-war libertarians, and
their absorption into the neoconservative grand consensus, is an event worth
noting only as an object lesson in what it means to fail.

LIBERTARIANISM - ALIVE AND WELL

The real libertarianism, however, is alive and very well, thank you,
flourishing as a result of the great work being done by Llewellyn H.
Rockwell, Jr., president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, as well as
Antiwar.com's sponsoring organization, the Center for Libertarian Studies.
We are reaching, every day, tens of thousands of people from practically eve
ry country on earth. From the Midwest to the Middle East, from Northern
Europe to South and Central America, the libertarian message on the vital
issue of war and peace - as well as free trade and economic and personal
liberty - is being broadcast globally to a large and steadily increasing
audience. Let the "warbloggers" and pro-war "libertarians" congratulate each
other on their career-advancing war fervor, and imagine they are defining
the terms of the debate. We are defining the future of libertarianism - that
is, if it is to have one.

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