The Growing Poverty Of Political Debate

[New York Libertarians]

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-30/growing-poverty-political-debate

[Ördög]

More off topic uncommented bullshit zerohedge Lie-bertarian click bait
spam flushed!

Only Usenet illiterate idiots would fall for that.

And this was brought to you again by this community hating disgruntled,
white,aging and Alzheimer ridden upper-middle-class, conservative-
capitalist-neo-lie-beral-neo-lie-bertarian wealth-addicted, ego-maniac
and utterly sociopathic Google Groups wanker.

Apparently he is ending the year with full on alt-righ capitalist lie-
bertarian hate!

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For the current state of impasse in civilised dialogue between the more
moderate and extreme factions of the political right in the USA are
partly the capitalist conservative lie-bertarians are to be held
responsible with their unwillingness to compromise even the slightest!

So take this!

*Libertarians have more in common with the alt-right than they want you
to think*
By John Ganz
/John Ganz is a Brooklyn-based writer and executive editor at Genius.com.
His writing has appeared in the Outline, the Brooklyn Rail, Even
Magazine, and Riot of Perfume.
September 19, 2017/

Source:
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/19/
libertarians-have-more-in-common-with-the-alt-right-than-they-want-you-to-
think/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0cd2458f0f3d>


"After the alt-right march on Charlottesville last month, Matt Lewis,
writing at the Daily Beast, pointed out the existence of an apparent
“libertarian to alt-right pipeline,” an ideological trajectory through
which those who begin life as ordinary, freedom-loving libertarians wind
up more aligned with the torch-wielding demonstrators.

Members of the non-mainstream right were quick to distance themselves
from the alt-right, which is a small, far-right movement that seeks a
whites-only state. Taylor Millard, writing on Hot Air, heaped abuse on
the alt-right, calling them “grifters” and “fakers,” and calling on his
fellow conservatives and libertarians to decisively “purge” the alt-right
from their ranks. Nick Gillespie, an editor at the libertarian magazine
Reason, denied that there is any “pipeline” between libertarianism and
the alt-right, arguing that real, liberty-loving libertarians reject the
collectivism and authoritarianism of the alt-right. Michael Brendan
Dougherty, writing in the National Review, similarly asserted that
there’s not much to the whole idea of a “libertarian-to-fascist”
pipeline, that fringes will be fringe, and that “kooks” will always
congregate there.

It’s probably true that some of the overlap between libertarians and alt-
righters can be explained by their companionship as members of the
political fringe. But it’s not purely accidental, either. Historically,
prominent libertarian thinkers have made the decision to cultivate ties
with the nationalist far right, and have viewed racial demagoguery both
as an efficacious political tool and an intellectually defensible
position. The libertarian-to-fascist pipeline may have been forged
partially by coincidence, but it was also crafted and maintained.

[Libertarians wrestle with the alt-right in the wake of Charlottesville]

In the early 1980s, economist Murray Rothbard left the libertarian Cato
Institute, which he had helped found. Rothbard’s impatience with
respectability politics and the moderate tone enforced by the Kochs on
their organization (including Reason magazine) led to his departure. He
made common cause with another dissident libertarian named Lew Rockwell,
founder of the Mises Institute, a home for a more hardcore brand of
thought than was permitted at Cato.

A self-confessed admirer of Joseph McCarthy’s political tactics, Rothbard
wanted to put some emotional meat on the spare, abstract bones of
libertarian economics. Rockwell, who shared Rothbard’s strategy, penned a
series of virulently racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic newsletters on
behalf of Ron Paul, in hopes of crafting a viscerally appealing emotional
aura around libertarianism. “We are constantly told that it is evil to
be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational,” one missive went. “I
think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in
[Washington] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal,” said another. With
these themes, Rothbard and Rockwell brought sensation and visceral
feeling to a libertarianism that had otherwise been a matrix of lofty
abstractions.

The fullest articulation of Rothbard’s strategy — and a piece of
political cynicism for the ages — appeared in his 1992 essay “Right Wing
Populism,” an apologia for former Ku Klux Klan grandee David Duke’s
failed presidential run. Rothbard found much to like in Duke’s positions:
“lower taxes, dismantling the bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system,
attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides, calling for equal
rights for all Americans, including whites: What’s wrong with any of
that?”

Rothbard went on to argue that the mainstream libertarian project of
trying to convince “intellectual elites” by spreading “correct ideas”
through institutions such as Cato and Reason had failed. Libertarian
intellectuals were, after all, part of a corrupt and feckless ruling
class, so they had an invested self-interest in perpetuating their
situation. The elites had to be overthrown.

[Where did Trump get his racialized rhetoric? From libertarians.]

Rothbard’s eight-point program for toppling these elites included a call
to “abolish affirmative action, set aside racial quotas, etc., and point
out that the root of such quotas is the entire ‘civil rights’ structure,
which tramples on the property rights of every American.” Also in his
program was a call for economic nationalism, under the ominous heading
“America First.”

Perhaps it’s not fair to lay blame for Rothbard the heretic at the feet
of the mainline libertarian church, which attempted to purge him. But
even putting Rothbard aside, his views were too widely shared to be
dismissed as a fluke. Rothbard’s disciple Hans-Hermann Hoppe has kept
alive his master’s dialogue to this day: His Property and Freedom
Society’s yearly symposiums have hosted talks by Richard Spencer, Jared
Taylor and Peter Brimelow, founder of VDARE, the anti-immigration site
that also counts Hoppe as a contributor.

Hoppe’s book “Democracy: The God that Failed” cites specious scholarship
on the IQ differences inherent in race to support his arguments, presents
an “anarcho-capitalist” defense of segregation as the prerogative of
property owners, and is so unabashedly anti-egalitarian he doubts the
basic humanity of people who don’t fit into his ideological schema. A
characteristic passage goes: “A member of the human race who is
completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor
performed under a division of labor based on private property is not
properly speaking a person, but falls instead in the same moral category
as an animal — of either the harmless sort (to be domesticated and
employed as a producer or consumer good, or to be enjoyed as a “free
good”) or the wild and dangerous one (to be fought as a pest).”

[Alt-right protester present at Charlottesville loses his job at a
libertarian hot dog shop]

How did Rothbard, Hoppe and others end up keeping company with the likes
of Spencer, Taylor and Brimelow? The problem is that libertarian
principles, which revolve the abstract notion of self-interest, are
really not principles at all; they have no content and allow anything to
be attached to them. Abstract self-interest alone can provide no
instructive rule of thought and can disqualify no particular course of
action, because each person is free to concoct what is in their best
interest, and because “aggression” can be and has been defined in a
variety of spurious ways.

It was the very bareness of the idea of self-interest and liberty as such
that allowed Chris Cantwell, the weeping neo-Nazi made infamous in Vice’s
coverage of Charlottesville (and avid reader of Hoppe and Rothbard) to
make conceptual space for racism: “People should be free to exercise
complete control over their own person and property. If blacks are
committing crimes, or Jews are spreading communism, discriminating
against them is the right of any property owner.”

It’s a quick step from here to full-on white nationalism, which
interprets history and politics as the story of different races pursuing
their collective self-interest. It shouldn’t come as a great surprise
that enshrining self-interest as the core of morality would lead to a
cynical worldview that takes all action to be struggle or manipulation.
The “liberty” of libertarianism is merely negative; and a mind guided
with the mere concept of its own interest can be led to anything or to
nothing. For this reason, the intellectual wasteland of libertarianism
continues to provide a safe space for fascists: It simply has
philosophical room for them, and no particular injunctions to turn them
away."

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:P :P :P :P

--
Ördög (Your newsgroup Devil in service of maintaining sanity in Usenet)
*What's wrong with libertarianism*
"That perfect liberty they sigh for-- the liberty of making slaves of
other people--
Jefferson never thought of; their own father never thought of; they never
thought of themselves, a year ago."
~ Abraham Lincoln ~