"Don't compromise yourself.
You are all you've got."
- Betty Ford
Remember when libertarian leading lights like Lew Rockwell and Stefan Molyneux used to make nuanced arguments for liberty? If so, then maybe you've been watching them as they sound more and more like apoligists for Donald Trump or David Duke lately and you're wondering what the hell happened.
Both men have always had a strong whiff of nativist white supremacist about them. This isn't a slight. It's an observation. Hey, we're all xenophobic and racist to some degree. The thing about liberty is that no matter how you think others ought to behave or how the world should look, you have to fight every unprincipled urge to resort to the state solution of forcing people to do your will through the threat of violence.
Maybe fumes from the zeitgeist that fuels Trump's popularity among the conservative, nativist, xenophobic right have saturated the brains of those libertarians who started out as right wingers in the first place. These days those who came in from the right are like vampires trying to be good...but with Trump channeling the roiling frustrations of rednecks and police statists, blood is in the air and the reformed quasi-libertarian vampires can't resist. They're giving in to their base instincts.
And by base instincts I do not mean their "race realism" or xenophobia. As unpalatable as I find their pseudo-scientific opinions on darkies like me, I respect their right to hold these opinions...and in truth I have more than a little sympathy for them the same way I do for ghetto snipes, the religious, drug addicts, and petty criminals, because they are merely the product of forces that shaped their opinions and behavior.
No, by base instincts I mean their desire to initiate violence to have their way. I mean their rationalizing the use of the state.
I'll be the very first to admit it: liberty gets hard. At least until you grow up enough to accept deep down in your boots that you really can't force peaceful people to behave the way you want. It takes a rare kind of grown up to live and let live even when other people's peaceful, i.e. consensual, activities annoy or disgust him. That's what's supposed to make libertarians different. They are the ones who see the state for the grand immorality that it is, like some sadistic pedophile who raises his children to believe that their routine rape at his hands is natural.
This is what it always comes to for the conservative sort: the hidebound, slightly incestuous desire to protect the tribe from change...which is kind of what happens to ALL cultures eventually. One hundred years or a thousand, each culture only has so long before it breaks apart entirely on its way to reforming into new cultures by melding with other cultures. Kind of like human beings themselves who are here for a while and then gone, their genetic codes and beliefs living on in others, but slightly transformed.
The desire to freeze cultures and societies forever as you as an individual have known them, however...that is irrational at best and delusionally, criminally psychotic at worst. Turning to the initiation of force to keep your culture "pure" forever...It doesn't work and it turns you into a violent, authoritarian monster.
I'm not saying not to discriminate and to accept all peaceful behavior. But it's up to the individual to disengage on an individual level with people with whom he doesn't agree. No libertarian would turn to the initiation of force (and the state is nothing but the distilled essence of the initiation of force) to get his way. No libertarian would turn to the state as a solution. If he does, he's not a libertarian. He's a paleoconservative maybe...or a neoconservative...or a nanny state liberal...or communist...or socialist...or fascist...or whatever label applies to the ends that his violent means justify in his mind. But he is no libertarian.
And that's ultimately my point. When a man starts arguing for state solutions to build the world he wants, he's forfeited whatever libertarian principles he'd been claiming. A libertarian may in his heart worry about there being too many non-whites within a 1500-mile radius for his liking. But he would never, ever support the state using its stolen funds to build walls, hire uniformed overseers to patrol it, and more agents to check peoples for papers of state permission to be on private property.
Maybe it would be a little clearer to him if I started arguing for the state to guarantee just a tiny bit of a minimum wage...or a tiny bit of protectionism for minorities in the work place...you know, just a tiny bit of Affirmative Action. Then maybe he would see that we're all just back to lining up our armies at Mordor to seize the Ring of Power.
Once he starts arguing for solutions from the centralized monopoly on violence, he has to turn in his libertarian card. I'm not even saying he's not being practical in turning to the state. I am saying he is unprincipled and immoral and back on the side of the devils. No matter how nicely he frames his arguments -- no matter if it is for borders, policing, military, welfare, minimum wage, guns, or butter -- he is back to being just another thug for whom rape, murder, and theft justify the greater good as he sees it.
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