Conservatives and LibertariansNatural Allies

Ayn Rand is likely what most conservatives think of when they think libertarian. A self-centered person, who is unwilling to accept any sort of social hierarchy or form of love for one's collective, whether that be their nation, their religion, or their history. Someone who rejects social norms and religion as contrary to their infantile rejection of social authority. Of course, those of us who truly understand libertarianism understand that an authority propagated by the property owner is not only just, but vital to a libertarian society. The Randian, or what Murray Rothbard dubbed the modal libertarian, is what the normal conservative despises. Those conservatives not of the formerly Trotskyist neo-conservatives, but instead those of the Old-Right, people like Robert Taft, or in current form Paul Gottfried.

The modal libertarian, who will from now on be referred to as an ML (not to be mistaken for a Marxist-Leninist), is the exact opposite of what any good conservative would aspire to be. This libertarian will, for example, have no care for a shared and common history of people, nor will he have any concern for the social collectives that a people may form. The ML does not care about aggression, but is instead in a teenage revolt against authority, against the family, against his neighbors, against society at large, and against the bourgeois morality that is so complementary to private property. The ML is likely a proud Jo Jorgenson supporter, and finds himself somehow able to avoid cringing at Jo Jorgenson’s “Prostitution is basically capitalism and sex, which one of those two are you against? I’m for both.” comment. In fact, he may even find this as empowering, and not a complete rejection of any realistic libertarianism, one which is not accepting of moral relativism and short sighted behavior. He also views any kind of “oppressive” (often just referring to the most historically successful) institution to be in need of dismantling. He wants to destroy the patriarchy and is of course unwilling to recognize that a patriarch is the unit that most private property is based on. He wants to diminish and replace whites and heterosexuals, possibly through immigration, as their very existence is oppressive to homosexual minorities. With all of this, it's hard to see how the conservative is supposed to like him. I, who, disregarding cultural views, essentially completely agree with the ML or the Randian despise him.

The conservative of course is not one who is ever going to have a positive view of the Randian orthe ML. As Robert Nisbet wrote in A History of Sociological Analysis the two concepts central to the conservative are property and authority, which implies both liberty and order. The ability for the recognition of property is to the conservative a human appendage, which gives him superiority to the world. For a more direct understanding, we go to Hans Hermann Hoppe’s ​Democracy: The God that Failed, ​the conservative accepts two layers of authority for man: that of the earthly physical authority, the parents, lords, and kings, and the spiritual-intellectual authority of a father, priest, a bishop, and God. Hoppe details conservatism as wanting to preserve the family and the social hierarchies and layers of material as well as spiritual-intellectual authority based on and growing out of family bonds and kinship relations. What I have just described of course relates back to the central principles of liberty and order. So clearly with that understanding of the conservative mindset, we understand the distaste that he has with the libertarian. They disagree on the key conservative concepts. One may ask, how is it possible to forge any dismal alliance let alone uncover any kind of natural alliance between these two groups. Well, it is not possible to form an alliance between the ML/Randian and the conservative. Instead what can be done is to forge an alliance between the libertarians who are much more reasonable and much less infantile than the Randian. Those who recognize that the only reason why authority is negative is because of the state and its aggression. Authority as the conservative recognizes it, that which is voluntary is completely and totally valid. It is especially valid when a property owner does it, and if he or a group of property owners hold it up as a social norm, rejecting those who do not follow the social norms. This libertarian, the Rothbardian or the Hoppean, will understand that a group of people who view themselves as a collective can and should be allowed to separate, who respect religion, who have a distaste for moral relativism (often used to discredit the ethically valid property rights), who views the family unit and the nuclear family (which come from the division of labor) as complementary to any property rights system. It is quite simple though, not all libertarians are conservatives, nor are all conservatives libertarians. We must examine and critique these two groups and show why it is logical for these groups must in fact share a deep disdain for the state and a deep appreciation for bourgeois morality, and of what the conservative appreciates, the family and social hierarchies.

We must also have some understanding of libertarian principles to continue. Put simply libertarianism is the respect of self-ownership, and its logical extension, property rights, which are validated through the homesteading principle. One violates these rights by aggressing someone else. Violation of such rights would be a performative contradiction.

First, we look at the conservative. For this, I will look at the rise of two important conservatives, both of whom I hold respect for, though one more than the other. For this, we must examine the former candidate for the 1992 and 1996 Republican nomination for president Pat Buchanan, and now former president Donald Trump. Now both of these candidates ran on some version of a platform of Paleo-Conservatism. Now only one made it to the white house, sadly the much less principled one. Both of these candidates received some level of support from the anarcho-capitalists of their time. Pat Buchanan received support from Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell, and Hans Hermann Hoppe. This was of course the libertarians' paleo-strategy, and we saw another version of this with the candidacy of Donald Trump. Sadly while Trump was shown to be, as Hoppe described, “another presidential warmonger” his message during his campaign was clearly a page from that of Pat Buchanan. One of staunch anti-interventionism, anti-elitism, economic nationalism, and immigration restrictionism. While Trump showed himself to not be able to deal with those problems appropriately he did show the elites that we are willing to throw a wrench in their system. Trump also enjoyed support from many anarcho-capitalists, such as Lew Rockwell and Walter Block. Much of this contingent on his much superior foreign policy when compared to that of his challenger, Hillary Clinton, but of course some areas of agreement on other important issues were found, with people like Hoppe and Rockwell agreeing with his immigration restrictionism, a completely valid and entirely libertarian position.

Now above we strictly see examples of libertarian-conservative alliances but logical justification on why they must ally are not found. We now will see that the conservative and the libertarian can ally, not only must ally himself with the libertarian, but he himself must be anti-state. First, we must understand the effects of a government expansion of the welfare state on the family. The welfare state, by virtue of its collectivization of individual responsibilities, will inevitably lead to the diminishing of value that a child has to the parent. This would be because all future expenses are covered, and the necessity for you to engage in some kind of childbearing to ensure that future expenses are covered is minimal. It is also much less likely for one to be in the economic situation in which childbearing is preferable when one, for example, is confident that if he maintains his wage rate below some arbitrary number to ensure that his welfare payments continue he will continue receiving the check that he is “entitled” to from the taxpayer. Investment in children is now no longer economically advantageous. All future expenses for you are covered by the “public good” and increasing income to have a suitable home for a child, who will have more marginal utility for you if you maintain economic stability, is not preferable, not only because these payments are lost, but because you are punished when removing yourself from this parasitic relationship with society. The marginal utility of children then diminishes. In fact, the promotion of high time preference behaviors and overall higher planning horizons are inherent for any society that promotes this expansionary state. If one’s medical expenses are currently covered or will be covered in the future and he is certain of this then the use of drugs, intoxication, promiscuous sex, out-of-wedlock births, and generally below-average intelligence actions will increase. Why should one worry as these things are covered for you? In fact, why not take advantage of them? It is considerably worse when it is proposed to even subsidize some of these actions, for example, out of wedlock births.

Not only that these conservatives advocate for a strong state to get involved in social affairs, instead of allowing the private family, and more importantly shame from the larger society to fix issues of alternative lifestyles, drug use, parasitism, overly egalitarian and overly libertine people. While Buchanan and the neo-conservatives differ, they both agree that the state is valid, and more importantly, they agree that continual state intervention is valid. They want to monopolize the family functions. When the state is now the true property owner all previously held power on the part of the natural patriarch who heads the family unit is now lost. When the state can decide what you can do, where you can eat, when your child can go to school, where your child must go to school, what he must learn, hell even if your child can go to school the functions of the family unit have now been delegated to the state completely disintegrating any kind of natural patriarchal system. Instead, a system led by faceless bureaucrats decides family matters for you.

Sadly, the conservatives who I was earlier praising are guilty of ignoring these negative consequences. These conservatives view that the government must be responsible for ensuring American jobs, and in this sense validating that economic welfare must be in the hands of the government. The idea, being economic nationalism, cannot coexist with any kind of social conservatism. Economic nationalism is now propagated by many on the political right, by people such as Sam Francis or, in our circles, that of the “intellectual” internet teenagers such as Kai Schwimer who revealed himself as a propagator of this type of ideology through his promotion of UBI and tariffs, and his flirtations with economic leftism, and conservative socialism, specifically with his “wary of capitalism” comment. Now Kai, of course, has shown sympathy for the leftists, which I view as negative, but his social conservative position is superb, his valuing the family unit and acceptance of social hierarchy is complementary to any kind of private property anarchism. My quarrel is with his economics. In order for any kind of conservatism to exist without the corruption of the state completely destroying it, one who is a conservative must be radically anti-statist.

Libertarians for far too long have shown little understanding of social norms. The idea that the following of simple rules on no public drug use is a crushing blow to liberty is idiotic. In fact, under a system of anarcho-capitalism and covenants, the idea that you would be allowed to smoke weed on the streets, or participate in open nudity, or in more controversial cases, be openly anti-"the religion that those in the covenant follow," or have free, open immigration is not only idiotic but itself anti-liberty. One under this sense does not have the liberty to use his property as he wants. We must also understand to continue this argument, that those who speak on anarcho-capitalism must continue understanding that we do not generally speak of people who are completely atomized and who live privately and separately from others within the community. Instead, we speak of largely covenant communities, which are private communities to which entry can be applied for. These communities can and will restrict their entry to whomever the covenant owner/owners want the community to be restricted to. The relationship between the covenant owner, and those who live under him, the tenants of the property, is purely contractual. The task of continual maintenance of this property is not only for one man, and the proprietor of the land, the covenant owner will be perfectly happy to allow the community elite to take up this task. The elite are, of course, different from the current parasitic elite who feed off the public good and themselves are fans of the state, but instead are Jefferson's natural elites who gain their acceptance first from their ability to most successfully homestead and participate in contractualism.

To stick to this point of the elites in an anarcho-capitalist covenant community, we must understand that under a system of property rights, egalitarianism as a concept is not even slightly valid. Property rights are inherently anti-egalitarian, as the accumulation of property is based on the highest amounts of mutually beneficial and successful voluntary agreements by you or a previous family member. The acceptance of egalitarianism and moral relativism is inherently anti-property rights. The socially progressive movement will never accept an egalitarian social policy without dismantling the anti-egalitarian property rights structure. The socially conservative movement is inherently anti-egalitarianism. Now the property owner, in this sense the proprietor, in an attempt to avoid self-destruction will have to be expressly hostile towards any kind of egalitarianism and parasitism, both often enemies of property rights. They will have to expel those who advocate communism, socialism, syndicalism, and democracy, and also those who advocate parasitic lifestyles that do not add to the continuation of the covenant community. There we see the validation of the aforementioned conservative value of preservation of the family unit. In this sense, a libertarian must be a conservative.

To continue on the elites, as I mentioned before these elites will often have to take up the tasks of continual maintaining of the community. We must also understand how these elites get their place in society. In the case of these covenant communities, it's simple. This is by being part of a family unit, possibly a dynasty which has not only most successfully homestead and participated in contractualism, but also who fit the model of the morally upright. While, of course, no family is free of sin, this unit manages to maintain the best public image, and also must in some sense actually have a very successful family structure. The actual structure of the unit is unimportant, what matters is that the family is viewed as morally upright and something for those within the community to aspire to be. Of course, any property owner has direct authoritarian control over those who are in their property, but to some degree have whatever control the proprietor has designated to them. This is where the second principle of social hierarchy is found.

Through this, we have seen the natural reaction of both of these ideologies to be some version of conservative libertarianism. Likely one similar to that proposed by Murray Rothbard, Hans Hermann Hoppe, and Lew Rockwell. It is clear, the conservative and the libertarian are not distant enemies as one would assume they were with my original description of the Randian or the ML. Instead, they are natural allies. We must ensure to unite against the egalitarians, against the left-liberals, and re-envision the paleo-strategy.