Post-Libertarianism Is A State Of Mind, or How To Spot A Reactionary Libertarian

it has come to my attention that my political and personal activities confuse some people. namely, I retain a wide range of acquaintances across social media venues, especially libertarians of various stripes (“bleeding-heart libertarians,” “classical liberals,” “libertarian brutalists,” “anarcho-capitalists,” and more). 

of course, I understand the need for any particular affinity group, well, to protect its affinity. I can see especially why a semi-anonymous, token female (sometimes employed by the political enemy) would raise suspicions amongst neoreactionaries. I wrote about where I stood politically with respect to reactionary thought earlier this year, but much has changed in the past six months. however, upon extensive reflection, it’s hard to pinpoint to any hard policy changes of mind as having followed from this reactionish turn.

mea culpa for this gag-worthy phrase, but it’s beginning to seem like post-libertarianism is, above all, a state of mind. here are some examples, from libertarian platform issues, to illustrate what I mean. if you are committed to pegging a libertarian-seeming person as The Enemy, you’ll never find out enough about him to tell. but if you are an intellectually curious person who remains interested in understanding the changing topology of (especially internet) political philosophy, this matters.

fertility false consciousness

so, Jim wrote recently about the cause of population decline: in a word, educating females. writing’s on the wall:

Schooling                                                        Children
No schooling                                                        6.67
Islamic Schooling, no Western Schooling        7.78
Western Schooling to ages 7 to 11                     4.5
Western Schooling to ages 12 to 13                  1.44
Western Schooling to ages 15 to 16                   1.57
Western Schooling to age 17 and above          1.50

I still pretty readily experience liberal-progressive reactions to things, and so I want to explain to you what these statistics look like to a prog and, moreover, why that particular interpretation is problematic.

the prog explanation is that un- and under-educated women either literally cannot keep themselves from having more babies than they want (due to difficulties in obtaining or using reliable contraceptive methods), or that they used to think they wanted a bunch of kids but education helped them to correct that belief.

in other words, progs assume that less-educated women are suffering from a kind of fertility false consciousness. if the only thing life has to offer them is kids, then they’ll take a large helping, but as soon as you “empower” / “enlighten” / “open doors” for women, they choose anything but.

notice prog types also believe that characteristics of people and features of institutions are deeply “socially constructed.” especially gender roles. although progs mostly allow that men and women might be a little different innately on average and at the margins, the cause of most of our apparent differences is nurture. a society which treats men and women very differently reaps what it sows: men and women who are very different. this is morally unacceptable because a person deserves to be treated as the tabula rasa she is: a self-determined and autonomous creature ultimately of her own (not society’s) making.

so here’s my question to the fertility false consciousness-type progressive: if we take some human female raw material, and split them into into two groups, leaving one alone and coercively subjecting the other to years if not decades of increasingly value-laden instruction, and find that these two groups have different preferences regarding children. which practice has done more to respect the autonomy and innate preferences of those women? and which might be thought, prima facie and ceteris paribus, to have (wrongly) “constructed” some non-native preferences?

to be fair, part of this depends on what you think the purpose of education is. I know sadly more about this bizarro corner of academia than I care to admit, but basically you have a few competing camps (with overlap): educating for happiness, educating for flourishing, educating for the social good, and so on. progressives, being strangely both individualistic and collectivistic, won’t do themselves any favors in defending on these grounds because women don’t individually seem to be that happy post-education-revolution and society is in many respects functioning less well than it used to, with respect to the family.

now, I don’t necessarily accept the conclusion that we should stop educating females. it’s difficult to deny that a certain level of education (probably middle school levels of literacy and math) is a huge gain to most women themselves as they function in their everyday lives, and to the children who they raise (either directly, from being taught by mom, or indirectly from her being able to do more for and with them). the fertility drop from that level of education is, then, morally less questionable, because it trades off for substantial value – it’s a choice we might even argue that hypothetical autonomous agents would make for themselves, ex-ante.

my (admittedly possibly non-representative) impression from reading mainstream media accounts of educating girls in undeveloped countries is that they feel left out from learning how to read and such, because it’s clear that that would help them do the thing that they (*and* their brothers, incidentally) seem most to want to do: “help the family.” a few exceptional underprivileged girls (and boys) go on to become engineers or whatever. but, noticeably, basically no one reports that they aspire to a hedonistic DINK (dual income, no kids) lifestyle until after they’ve been put through the education machine. this observation is only non-suspect to those who assume from the get-go that (especially higher) education is an unalloyed good.

if anyone’s suffering from fertility false consciousness, it’s the very same college-graduated elites who want you to think that the most plausible and significant explanation for highly-fertile families is ignorance. they have been educated and enculturated out of even being able to imagine that sacrificing for the growing family is something that normal humans would often like to do, and something from which they derive meaning. displace some of your pity for under-educated girls onto them.

women’s wisdom falls on deafened ears

in light of my recent turn towards “traditional gender roles,” in theory and in practice, I have somehow unearthed a memory of a conversation I had with my mother ~15 years ago, when I was a teenager. I won’t pretend to understand why this conversation attracts my attention and imagination, for the risk of going full freudian, but I find it newly illuminated and illuminating, so here you go:

I was at home or in the car or whatever with my mom, and she told me that she had had a strange exchange with our neighbor recently. (for reference, the neighbors are a married couple about 5 or 7 years ahead of my parents with two somewhat older children, and of similar middle to upper-middle class SES). the context was something like, my mom saw the neighbor come in from a walk, or vice versa? and neighbor casually remarked something to the effect of: “oh, gotta stay in shape for our husbands now that we’re getting older!”

of course, my mom in relating this to me, feigned bafflement and mild offense at (and even pity towards) our neighbor. but here are some things our neighbor definitely did not mean by her comment:

• all men are pigs.
• abandonment is inevitable, but you can delay it maybe?
• that husband of yours sure seems like a cheating scumbag.
• my husband is a scumbag, and I want to worry everyone else about theirs now too.
• marriage vows and promises of fidelity mean nothing.
• a woman’s only value to the world is her beauty.
• every married man just wants a newer model once he’s gotten kids from his wife.
• I worry every minute of every day about my appearance. 
• I don’t trust my husband, and you shouldn’t trust yours either.

I’m not sure what my mom’s motivations were, in even telling me about this exchange. was it out of “wow just wow,” in that she was very deeply offended by our neighbor’s insinuations, and she needed to vent? on the other hand, perhaps she was genuinely concerned that our neighbor was on to something but she just didn’t like it. I don’t know.

but here’s the point: as an adult woman who has by now gathered her own experiences in the realm of gender relations (and even marriage), I can begin to appreciate what really happened here. our neighbor was, in some combination, expressing a bit of natural anxiety about the major life change of becoming an empty nester, offering solidarity with my mother, gesturing towards common-sense advice, and making small talk of what she presumed was mutual interest.

I now believe that there was nothing at all wrong with what my neighbor said to my mom; it was mildly overly personal at worst, and reflected the honest truth: that marriages work best when people try at them, that men and women are expected to bring different blends of goods to the marriage table, and that to pretend otherwise doesn’t make your marriage more liberal-progressive, it makes your marriage more fragile. I don’t know why my mom wasn’t prepared to acknowledge this (obviously, it’s tempting to blame feminism), but that refusal didn’t do her any favors and, though I don’t care to make a victim of myself, the attitude that she passed on to me has heretofore threatened my life prospects at the margin as well.

though this is just an ungeneralizable n=1 situation, for what it’s worth, I can’t resist adding that that marriage, and related wealth, and the family, remain intact today – while ours do not.

How And Why The Tunney Neocameralist Petition Split Libertarian Opinion

By now, I’m sure you’ve seen that our friend Justine Tunney has drafted a petition at Whitehouse.gov called: “Transfer all federal administrative authority to the tech industry.” (btw, I had the great pleasure of meeting her IRL recently and let me tell you, her capacity as an “ideological chaos machine” is matched by her friendliness, thoughtfulness, and good listenership).

Anyways the petition proposes basically exactly what you’d expect from its title: retire federal employees, transfer admin authority to the tech industry, and name Eric Schmidt (of Google) as CEO of the United States. It was written up in The Guardian, and a more recent piece by an acquaintance of mine with an interview is at Quartz. Tunney (further) grabbed attention in neoreactionary circles owing to the fact that this is essentially a neocameralist suggestion, and she herself has come out as more or less a neocameralist, like Moldbug of course.

Now, we could discuss the proposal itself at some length. I’ve seen twitter discussions, this stuff riles up the split between… um, who you could call traditionalist reactionaries and the urban/techno-futuristy set. The former are more into monarchy, the latter would basically welcome our pseudo-corporate overlords, so long as they can hack it at the government task.

Additionally, Tunney has directed our attention to this post providing criticism of her proposal, and it’s solid though basically what you’d expect from someone who objects substantively and not in the WOW JUST WOW manner. Its tl;dr — thinking that business leaders will be good at government is actually just an old right-wing piece of ideology, the accuracy of which rests upon the dubious assumption that the two projects (business and government) are relevantly similar. Though, lol, that author suggests that corporations are essentially “benign dictatorships” as if the realization is supposed to turn us off to the Tunney petition, whups.

Anyways substantive critique is not my purpose here. Here in my post-libertarian honeymoon phase, I find myself still firmly intellectually, socially, and professionally situated amongst real libertarians of all stripes: I identify enough with them to understand their trains of thought and to accept many of their premises, but distanced enough to attempt criticism of a different-than-the-boring-libertarian-infighting type.

So, in that context, I’ve been wondering for days: what explains disparate libertarian reactions to this neocameralist proposal? On Facebook, my share of it got some traction, and comments I saw regarding the petition basically split between that WOW JUST WOW thing, and tepid approval or non-disapproval (sentiments like: “couldn’t be worse than the status quo,” and “ok but I’d prefer Richard Branson to Schmidt”).

Usually, explaining disparate libertarian reactions to a policy is both easy and uninteresting: they split along consequentialist and deontological lines. Some people are libertarian because they think, empirically, it best conduces to widespread human welfare. Some people are libertarian because non-aggression principle + muh rights. Coalitions are formed when these considerations closely intersect (e.g., end the war on drugs); coalitions are busted when they don’t (e.g., gun rights, gay rights). The new, hip intellectual ground in libertarianism is to carve out some principled middle ground between the two camps; see especially Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness. This is intellectually important work, and therefore unsatisfying to anyone other than the intellectuals… sigh.

Libertarian reaction to the neocameralist proposal didn’t split consequentialist/deontologist-wise. That is, some welfare libertarians who think that a tech industry CEO could do a decent job of running the U.S. found the petition massively repugnant. And some rights libertarians, who think that installing a tech industry CEO would flagrantly violate individual rights to property and political self-determination, found the petition fairly innocuous. This is curious. What does it mean?

First, it means that welfare libertarians are even more leftist than commonly suspected (take that as you will). Welfare libertarians used to seem quite leftist in virtue of advocating for things like marriage equality and social insurance / basic income. But here we see that, at bottom, welfare libertarians prefer the chaos of a demotic system even when it frustrates their own goals of achieving greater widespread human welfare. After all, there is no particular reason to believe that a CEO of America would be any more capriciously, needlessly oppressive to individual liberty than the current state of affairs in the country is. And so is revealed a welfare libertarian deontic constraint on the pursuit of welfare (which of course there had to be), albeit an inane and probably merely aesthetic one: prefer the arrangement that seems more fair and more respectful to individuals, even if it gets them little of what they want or need. Importantly, this reaction also reveals that welfare libertarians are much less into “non-ideal theory” and “second-best” political solutions than they often, self-righteously boast. Disappointing.

Second, the observations above mean that deontic, rights-based libertarians are marginally less awful than I previously thought. Usually they’re all NAP NAP NAP and you want to smack them. Also they systematically undervalue important historical and contemporary academic thought, none of which fully comports with The Almighty Rothbard. However! What’s interesting and promising about rights libertarians is that they do not sugarcoat the realities of a robustly libertarian world — realizing that, left to their own voluntary devices, people will sort themselves probably largely homogeneously, income inequality will abound, and etc (therefore the friendliness with Hoppe).

In other words, rights libertarians are consciously or subconsciously comfortable with social hierarchy in a way that the leftists (libertarian or otherwise) will never be. So, while they still consider the state as a gross, large-scale, systematic violation of individual rights, there is no need to overcome with them the expectation that any viable societal arrangement — conventionally governmental, neocameralist, or anarchic — will secure equality of outcome, opportunity, political power, respect, moral status, or any other good, in any way, shape, or form.

Thanks for joining me in adventures in libertarian political psychology, signing off-

CW.

not dead.

hey y’all, hope you’re well. just wanted to say that I am not dead – just busy! no sooner than I got this thing going, I somewhat unexpectedly was invited to become a housegirlfriend of sorts, lulz. as I probably don’t need to explain to you, moving’s a bitch. hopefully it’ll all be over in a week or so.

have been accumulating blog post topics in evernote and look forward to coming back in full force asap ❤

Rawls for Reactionaries

This is long but good. You should read it if you are interested in academic political philosophy and/or the proper nature of political consent and/or new and bizarre directions in the reaction. You should not read it if you think it’s pointless to deconstruct – or even understand – liberalism, and/or if you are kinda dull. Good luck.

I was assigned some Moldbug on a second date with a stranger from the internet (lulz) but I honestly haven’t made it through much yet (mea culpa). However, in the middle of doing some late-night browsing recently, I came across his 2007 treatment of Rawls, the cryptocalvin (<– totally viable candidate for naming my firstborn son, btw). As Moldbug rightly notes, Rawls has already been taken down pretty thoroughly and, I think, at least somewhat enduringly by none other than Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Incidentally, I have it on good credit that Bob Nozick used to attend and lecture at libertarian summer camps, where he did lines of coke and hooked up with the college- and grad school-aged students. Much to my chagrin, I missed that era of the Liberty Movement (gag).

Anyways, thinkers like to tread our own, ostensibly novel intellectual paths even if the existing ones are pretty well-worn… maybe it’s hubris, in which case I have plenty. Moldbug has taken the time to put his stamp on the argument against Rawlsianism, but it’s unfortunately pretty off-base. If you just want to critique liberalism in general, cool – it assumes many forms and expressions, and whichever you take as an example, that’s fine. But if you want to critique Rawls, per se, then you must first represent Rawls accurately. Anything less discredits an already marginal body of thought, and should be intellectually embarrassing. No need to become a Rawls scholar – that would raise the barriers to entry to the discussion unacceptably high – but you should have a good command of the fundamentals at least.

Rawls is still wrong, but Moldbug strawmans the hell out of him here. In my experience, and admittedly, it’s a common misinterpretation of the veil of ignorance. So it’s important that we identify the misinterpretation for what it is, correct it, and then take down – maybe even repurposing – Rawls properly. Here goes. If I may quote from the scripture Moldbug at some length:

monarchism, libertarianism, and self-serving political bias

As I’m sure anyone who’s reading this knows, neoreactionary thought has been getting some attention in the mainstream media, and a prominent feature of the body of thought is monarchism. Neoreactionary objectors of all stripes may be prone to accuse its proponents of arguing disingenuously, thinking that the resulting political order will favor them (“they probably all just think they are going to be king, hah hah!”) In particular, libertarians are beginning to come out against nrxn, probably in order to distinguish themselves, because the two share some other similarities (e.g. an emphasis on political rights of exit, emphasis on desert over egalitarianism, etc). But I find this objection about wanting to be king particularly strange coming from libertarians, seeing as how they face an analogous objection on the regs.

Take your now-standard, internet-dwelling leftish libertarian. He says that freer markets and smaller government are the way to go, for some melange of principled or moral, and related empirical, reasons. A garden-variety liberal objects to these recommendations, on the basis that she thinks a libertarian world would systematically advantage white men, who would be even less restricted than ever in their pursuit of naked self-interest, and who would be unencumbered to “give back” or fulfill the demands of social justice.

The libertarian has 2 options: deny and/or defend the distributions that would seem to result from his regime. He will deny that freer markets benefit mostly white men (complete with lots of examples of non-white and female entrepreneurs, of course). And he will defend whatever unequal distributions remain, as being earned rather than the product of crony capitalism. “Libertarianism has nothing to do with wanting advantages for oneself, we swear! In some ways, a freer market would disadvantage many white men, who’d face increased business competition due to reduced barriers to entry, for instance.”

But libertarians will also need to defend the white male advantage that libertarianism is likely to preserve to some extent, and this is especially difficult to do as a white male. Actual white guys would get a head start in the libertarian world because of how well they’re doing in the status quo, and it would persist in the climate of freer markets because there are economic advantages associated both with being white and with being male. It may be true that the welfare state harms women and minorities in the long run/on net, but that doesn’t mean that libertarianism would equalize outcomes or even opportunities.

Monarchists find themselves in much the same position with respect to the “you just want to be king” (or to occupy the top echelons of elites) objection: deny that monarchists are just imagining that they’ll be in power, or defend the fact that, under monarchism and its attendant elite, that those people really will be. But monarchists have a better reply. They should outright deny that monarchists each think they’ll be in power, because just mathematically very few people will hold significant political power under such a system – indeed, that is one of its virtues! To advocate for monarchy without realizing this would make you an idiot, so the criticism that all monarchists just think they in particular will benefit power-wise is offered in very bad faith.

Also, critically, note that this is a fair criticism of standard liberals, too. Who do you suppose will end up running and staffing the constantly-expanding crop of bureaucracies underpinning technocratic utopia? It’s the liberals: college-educated, white-collar, politically correct, culturally hegemonized, pseudo-intelligentsia + managers. They stand to benefit financially at least as much as small potatoes welfare recipients, typically much much more, with a huge status bump too.

tl;dr – of course we each harbor both self-interested and impersonal reasons for adopting most of the political beliefs that we do. Striking a balance between these is part of the exercise. There is no particular reason to think that monarchism, and monarchists, fare worse on this desiderata of a political philosophy than do libertarianism or liberalism (both of which are actually prima facie more likely to be motivated by sheer self-interest). So stfu about monarchists all wanting to be king and find something more intelligent to say.

that’s not how norms work: divorce stigma edition

crap like this really grinds divorcees’ gears.
but it shouldn’t.

I think I mentioned this somewhere on here previously, but I have had what you could call a “starter marriage” already – I was briefly married to my long-time college boyfriend when I was in my early 20s. [More on the specifics of this, and the lessons I’ve learned, some other time for sure]. Within the last year or so, I ended up joining a Facebook group for women who have been divorced in their 20s, run by the author of a book on early divorce. This Facebook group is sociologically interesting (although mostly depressing) and it has gotten me thinking real hard about a number of aspects of the state of gender relations, dating, marriage, + family in the United States today.

Here’s the first of what I expect will be several important divorce board observations: the women in this group have absolutely no grasp of the situation regarding divorce stigma. Frequently, one member or another complains that some family member has made a backhanded and insulting comment about her divorce. Or, a Facebook acquaintance has posted a meme to the effect that “marriage is forever no matter what.”

However, these same divorcees complain about how uncommitted their ex-husbands were to their marriages: neither holding jobs nor helping around the house, refusing to talk about problems, abandonment at first sign of downturn in the relationship, whatever. In fact, they observe that in general men of formerly marriageable age seem not to get it and are shitty partners even if you can manage to talk them into marriage in the first place. Marriage is supposed to be a pretty sweet deal for both parties involved. However could this have happened?

Well, sorry ladies, you can’t have it both ways: Either…

1. Social norms regarding the permanence and moral significance of marriage exist – in which case they tend to shape men into husband material and explain why people disapprove of your divorce, or
2. Those norms don’t exist, and you’re stuck on a marriage merry-go-round in which no one cares whether your marriage lasts – including your husband(s).

Occasionally, I have joked about the marriage equality issue, saying stuff like: “Same-sex marriage objectors, don’t blame the gays. If you think there’s a problem with marriage in America, lay your blame with me.” It was tongue-in-cheek, but I kind of meant it. Even if your particular circumstances warranted (or at least seemed to warrant) divorce – lack of love, boredom, substance problems, infidelity, etc – what are social trends other than aggregations of individual decisions? The fact that any given person ends up divorced in her 20s is partially reflective of a previous climate of divorce in the moral community, but it then informs members of that community’s future behavior in turn. Kind of a vicious norms-weakening cycle.

I understand that it’s very hurtful to be on the receiving end of comments suggesting that you must not have taken your marriage seriously, that you didn’t try hard enough, that you’re disobeying God’s will, that you’re degrading civil society, and etc. But that’s the whole point! Norms don’t work if they don’t have teeth; although some members of society in effect free-ride on the willingness of others to enforce the social norms, those norms enforcers are critical to the norm’s health and its capacity to motivate individuals’ action. Indeed, if norms are not enforced adequately, then they eventually fall out of existence altogether.

Social norms have to be fairly general, so people pick them up easily and apply them readily to others even on the basis of fairly little information. It’s reasonable for a divorcé(e) to expect that his or her family and closest friends will care about the situation’s particulars enough to hear them out and to draw a more nuanced conclusion about whether the divorce was warranted, whether it’s turning out for the best, etc. It’s also reasonable to expect that mere acquaintances and strangers will obey norms of etiquette, refraining from outright rudeness (e.g., one divorcée’s relative sent her a Christmas card chastising her about it – totally uncalled for, and not constructive besides).

But these women of all people, the early divorcées, definitely realize that marriage matters, and they honestly want marriages to work. Criticizing the norms that will make this possible once again and refusing to participate in norms enforcement is near-sighted and contrary to their own purposes.

premises of reactionary thought: taking stock

I wrote this note to myself a couple of weeks ago. It has been posted by my desk at home for consideration.

So I’m not entirely sure how useful this particular post will be to anyone else, but it’s important that I write it regardless, seeing as how I find myself in an uncomfortable position lately with respect to my politics and even my worldview in general (a little more background is here if you want it). At least a couple of neoreactionaries have found me interesting to talk to in this capacity, because I am intelligent and still somewhat of an outsider to the movement, albeit a largely sympathetic one who’s becoming better informed by the day.

I got interested in NR shortly before the TechCrunch piece dropped, then there was the Vocativ thing, and I understand those were ok by mainstream media standards, but I’d rather take something written by a reactionary, for (neo)reactionaries, as a starting place for analyzing where I stand at present. Pretty sure that there has to be at least some controversy surrounding Michael Anissimov’s “Premises of Reactionary Thought,” but as far as I can tell it’s a fine place to begin. Having now dabbled in NR reading and NR twitter, here’s my status on each of the 5 basic criteria of reactionary thought that Anissimov offers:

1. Right is right.

Well, this is hard for me to stomach, because I have spent my whole life running in circles that pride themselves on being “liberal” and, through all my political wanderings, have never self-identified as departing liberal land in any important way. Of course, “liberal” and “conservative” used colloquially in the U.S. have particular connotations and extensions on the political scene as it is and it’s kinda screwed up. I do realize that “right” and “left” in this semi-technical sense have much more to do social order and disorder, respectively, than they have to with political parties or platforms or particular policy issues or whatever.

“Order” and “disorder” are a little loaded, though. I mean, who likes disorder? I can definitely pass the ideological Turing test for modern liberals, and I’m sure that people on the left would prefer to draw the distinction between something like social “stasis” and “dynamism.” That makes the disorder option sound better, doesn’t it?

I do understand that social disorder or dynamism or change is costly, often in ways that go largely unnoticed until it’s too late, and I have been taking more seriously than ever before the idea that social change is to be regarded mostly with suspicion and not dreamy-eyed optimism. So I guess, much to my own chagrin, that I’m basically on board with “right is right.” I need to sort out what “liberalism” still means to me, if anything. And I retain doubts that all forms of social disorder/disruption are to be avoided (or would have been better off being avoided); might say more about this at some point. However it’s possible that the rhetoric about order and disorder is just simplified, though, and that to attack that position would be strawmanning anyways. You guys can help me with this later.

2. Hierarchy is basically a good idea.

I was essentially in agreement with this principle even before stumbling upon NR, truth be told. I have long been deeply, deeply skeptical of liberal calls to equalize respect for persons, as by socially engineering jobs and familial arrangements and incomes. It’s one thing to try to raise the level of material well-being of the least well-off for humanitarian reasons, because they are suffering right now. But a substantial component of the well-being of some social creatures – e.g. primates, humans – originates in status itself, a positional good which cannot even in theory be distributed equally.

There’s something a little misleading about even speaking about hierarchy as being a “good idea.” It’s no one’s idea at all, and this is part of what the critics of hierarchy miss, thinking of it as they do as some conspiracy hatched by the powerful to form and protect a tiny class of elites. No one dreamed up hierarchy as a way of deliberately organizing human societies. It emerged due to a variety of biological, historical, cultural, and other factors, and continuously re-emerges in response to changes in the relevant factors. Attempts to remove or “flatten” hierarchy from the top down only twist it past the point of being useful or productive or meaningfully organizing at all.

This is not to say that hierarchy marks every social group in the same way – sometimes companies, under special conditions, are able to voluntarily and conscientiously flatten their organizational structures with some success. And of course, we can admit that hierarchy is basically a good idea without necessarily endorsing all particular features of the hierarchies existing writ large in society today. E.g., to the extent that hierarchies have developed in response to shitty government policies that reward rent-seeking behavior, they are morally on shaky ground. The problem is not that these policies allowed some hierarchy at all to develop. The problem is that they encouraged the formation of a particular hierarchy that’s not beneficial to society and to individuals in the right way, a hierarchy that rewards some of the undeserving at the direct expense of others. Proper hierarchies, on the other hand, are positive-sum with fair (though not necessarily equal) distribution of gains, and are morally unproblematic for that reason.

3. Traditional sex roles are basically a good idea.

This phrase reads funny to my feminism-worn ears, I am tempted to re-write as “gender roles,” but no use in getting hung up over that. And, as re: hierarchy, I think it’s a little off again to describe sex roles as an “idea” at all. Rather, they are (or used to be…) an emergent feature of sexual dimorphism and gender-related comparative advantages.

Anyways, for various reasons, I find gender roles particularly fascinating at this point in my life. As a woman in my late 20s who has alternately enjoyed and endured a number of mediocre to bad relationships with men over the past 10 years (including a “starter marriage,”) it is becoming increasingly important to get some handle on which kinds of relationships work well, and why. Having grown up firmly embedded within the liberal, educated, upper middle class, I have been exposed to a melange of useless information and impressions about what I can or should do with myself, qua woman: you’re so smart, go to college, go to grad school, get any job you want, lean in, have it all, you don’t have to have kids!, but you’ll surely want to, staying home would bore you to death, but not staying home will make you feel guilty, men should want you for your brain not your body!, but [name], you’re so pretty, when you’re older you’ll break hearts. It’s enough to make your head spin.

I’m not ready to condemn feminism in general as a necessarily + universally backwards, socially destructive movement. But it’s hard to deny that it’s fucked some things up. And some of its effects have spun themselves into apparently self-reinforcing, destructive cycles: e.g., it’s good for any individual woman to realize that, were it necessary, she could work outside the home to support her kids. But then women start expecting less from even their allegedly provider husbands. Now even the potential husbands are crappier providers, and the women see little reason to marry them, even when they’ve birthed those men’s children. The men have little reason to marry the women, too – they’re going to be difficult and expensive to live with, and difficult and expensive to divorce. Who’s winning here? Women who end up working even when they don’t want to? Unmarried men who live in a perpetual state of adolescence and sociofinancial marginality? Married men who endure chronic and pernicious emasculation? Latchkey children with absentee fathers?

I have had it up to here with the false consciousness explanations of women’s preferences to stay home and raise children. Given everything we know about evolution and men vs. womens’ places in that process, the burden of proof – and it is a heavy one – lies squarely upon anyone who wishes to disprove that women are, in general, natural child-rearers: we simply would not be here if the mothers before us weren’t.

This does not entail that it is bad or wrong for individual men and women to opt out of the basic family arrangement. It does mean that large-scale attempts to shift it by various means will work well for a few people and poorly for most. Politically and socially influential people are mostly projecting their own preferences, motivations, and capacities onto the population in general when they recommend policy and attitudes regarding these topics.

Also I expect that this venue will occasionally devolve into sex blogging lite. Thanks for bearing with me, or cross your fingers for it, depending.

4. Libertarianism is retarded.

Ok, I’m not the PC police, but I would have worded this differently. Actually, this is probably the aspect of NR thought about which I will have the most to say, and not all today, either. I have been involved with the “liberty movement” (gag) for about 5 years and definitely go through cycles of feeling excited, correct, unsettled, jaded, discouraged, over it… lather, rinse, repeat.

Being very familiar with libertarian internet subculture, I can tell you that quite a few of the 20-something set are actual anarcho-capitalists. Also the “Bleeding Heart Libertarian” tradition is rapidly coming to the academic fore, or should I say re-emerging, because one of their points is that libertarianism’s (i.e., classical liberalism’s) heritage is fairly leftist, and only relatively recently has libertarian thought come to be associated with the right and crony capitalism and such. This libertarian association with the right has been uneasy, of course, and “fusionism” has served as a perennial topic of discussion between Beltway libertarian types (e.g., Cato, Reason) who probably split liberal/conservative at philosophical bottom and those libertarians and anarchists who would eschew political participation altogether (e.g., many agorists, Free Staters, seasteaders).

So it’s a diverse group, definitely populated partially by “retards,” and even moreso by men “on the [autism] spectrum.” The movement is definitely large enough to attract mere contrarians, nerd groupies, econ jargon parroters, token women seeking attention, and worse, and they are growing louder and louder online by the minute. This makes the intellectual tradition – and present – look worse than it is. It makes it look retarded.

Anissimov claims that libertarians, having taken personal freedom as axiomatic and therefore valuable at all costs, “refuse to consider the negative externalities of that freedom to traditional structures like society and the family.” I don’t think this is a fair charge; it is at most true of talk show/caricatured libertarianism. For a long time now, libertarians and anarchists (some of those identifying both with the left and with the right) have concerned themselves with the ways in which government has intentionally or unintentionally shaped society for the worse. Many libertarians of the past and the present emphasize – and criticize – the way in which taxation and government actions/regulations crowd out mutual aid activity, which is preferable both on moral grounds (because it is voluntary) and because it can be more targeted and effective in its methods than bloated, knowledge-problem-laden social services bureaucracy.

Further, consider these standard libertarian talking points: The war on drugs, especially combined with certain forms of welfare, have decimated the poor, especially black families in the inner city. Heavy-handed regulations that make it difficult to start businesses keep the poor and poorly-connected from life-improving entrepreneurship opportunities that could feed their families and employ their neighbors. Housing regulations setting high bars for the goodness of homes see to it that marginal renters are homeless instead of temporarily situated in densely-occupied and less-than-glamorous apartments. And let’s not forget the mortgage subsidies that encouraged families ill-suited for home ownership to assume subprime and no/low-down-payment mortgages for too much house. This resulted in recession-era neighborhood blight and social upset instead of suburban paradise for all. These are all points made routinely by libertarians, in an effort to show how government fucks up family and community.

Also notice that libertarians mostly really love meritocracy, and frown upon attempts to tamper with the natural way in which the talented and smart and hard-working rise to the top. This is part of a larger libertarian acceptance or endorsement of hierarchy in general – again, libertarians mostly only have problems with hierarchies that are government-enforced or government-disrupted (e.g., the political ruling class and its undeserved wealth saturating the suburbs of Washington D.C.). Even apart from meritocratic considerations, libertarians tend to reject government attempts to alter the hierarchies that would result from voluntarily transactions in the marketplace, and for that reason oppose legislation to enforce gender wage parity, to require preferential hiring of disadvantaged groups, to contract with or protect some kinds of businesses instead of others, and so on. If the market “sees” a difference between persons, then that is presumptive reason to let that difference be acted upon, even if there remain uncomfortable patterns in the way that persons tend to be treated when we compare group over group. These aspects at least superficially check out as consistent with broad NR thought, as far as I can tell.

The idea that libertarians all just want to “go Galt,” and the charge that “if a libertarian society would leave many out in the cold, libertarians seem not to care” are cliched stereotypes of only the crudest and most immature of libertarians. I expect more of Anissimov than to repeat these sound bytes uncritically. It’s fine to reject libertarianism for other reasons; I expect that the main reactionary criticisms are simply that libertarians simultaneously (1) over-value individual liberty in principle, and (2) expect better outcomes from enhanced individual liberty in practice than are reasonable to expect. Let’s discuss these principled and practical objections to libertarianism, vis-a-vis the reaction/neoreaction, here more in the future.

5. Democracy is irredeemably flawed and we need to do away with it.

Moving as I have been within libertarian circles for the past 5+ years, this point is not so new to me, and it doesn’t strike me as particularly heretical to suggest it, even if it’s way afield of the Overton window. I was close to fully espousing anti-democratism even within the context of my libertarianism prior to stumbling upon the neoreaction.

Libertarians are often pretty happy to bitch about democracy to anyone who’ll listen, but there’s no real consensus about what system to endorse instead. Economists, many/most of whom are tepidly libertarian or classically liberal, have helpful analyses of how democratic stuff operates in practice: public choicey things like logrolling, diffusion of costs/concentration of benefits as pertains to lobbying, the rationality of (un)informed voting, legislation as the advance auction of stolen goods so pithily described by Mencken, etc etc. Beltway libertarians, mostly minarchists of whatever stripe, will talk a nice game about constitutionally-limited government, but kinda fail at suggesting what e.g. America could have done different to avoid especially the federal-level bloat that’s taken place over the past hundred years or so. You can always go anarchist in response to this democratic mess: what did our old friend Lysander Spooner say? “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.” This move is considered super radical, though, and may create more moral problems than it solves. So I dunno. I’ve recently been describing myself as “anarchist a few days per week,” but the whole thing is just very intellectually unsettling.

Problematically, since libertarians are already so often accused of being racists/classists/elitists/etc, they shy away from discussing sociocultural factors and their contributions to the failures of democracy at least as much as anyone else, because political correctness. You can’t talk about net tax payers versus net tax recipients because that breaks along race lines. You can’t talk about how some local and state governments, and their institutions like schools, work much better than others because of their underlying demographic homogeneity. So the minarchist-libertarian move is just to narrow the sphere of goodies and power over which the voters may fight to as little as possible, or nothing. This tactic is in some tension with premise (1) of reactionary thought, that right is right and chaos is to be avoided. On the one hand, libertarians want to free up the social and legal space of freedom within which individuals operate. On the other hand, they want to minimize the amount of power in the hands of the government. But as society destabilizes due to that social and legal freedom, the citizen-voters of even an initially minimal state will want more out of their government: more help, more stuff, anything to keep them from going off the rails of that socially unmoored roller coaster. Equilibrium at the libertarian minimal state seems unlikely to be achieved: possibly because democratic-bureaucratic government inherently tends to grab at more power, possibly because the citizens in such an unhinged society are eager to give it up, probably both.

So I don’t really have anything further to say about democracy and its alternatives for now, until I’ve read more NR stuff, which I understand is divided on this point between monarchists and those who would have governments run like corporations? The latter family of recommendations is more familiar to my libertarian self, as it is not dissimilar from the anarchist’s proposals of a switch (or perhaps a return, depending on how you understand history) to a system of polycentric legal order and voluntary protective agencies. I need to read more about this. It’s the weak spot in my understanding of reactionary thought for sure.

Ok, there you have it, a maybe sort of comprehensive account of where I stand on these 5 proposed premises of reactionary thought. Presently, I probably occupy some space at the useful periphery of the intellectual community: not a paradigmatic reactionary, but not a dedicated objector either. Although/because “libertarianism is retarded” is the premise which I have the most trouble in outright accepting, it seems likely that I’ll have the most to offer in thinking about libertarianism vis-a-vis the (neo)reaction. Also, as far as I can tell, the women of the neoreaction are mostly currently wives and mothers, so I may represent a different but productive perspective on the gender things (no PoMo – true is true, just that occupying different places in life can make different true points salient).

Anyways, welcome, thanks for your time and feedback if you have any, and stay tuned.

xo,

C-Dubs