from the Chiasmus archive: "CULTS OF THE CULTURE WARS (PART 2) – JANUARY 20, 2021"
The cultism of right wing libertarianism.
“Equality is not in the natural order of things, and to crusade to make everyone equal in every respect is certain to have disastrous consequences… At the head of the egalitarian left is the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere excise of human will.”
(Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and other Essays. Murry Rothbard 1972)
Like Irving Kristol, both he and Murry Rothbard, although Rothbard was fiercely indifferent to the institutionalization of right wing government and its associated imperialism, were neoconservatives in the sense that their common ground would be over the disdain for socialist influences and equality movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to which right wing libertarianism, began to become a focal point for some of the more right leaning Republican viewpoints in American politics. Rothbard’s libertarian view of his ‘Individualist Utopian’ free market within right wing capitalism, is completely hinged on private ownership and individualist control, in its almost paranoid fear that any form of revolutionary discord would unsettle the natural balance that Austrian Economics and American conservative idealisms rely on. This was a pitch that the grandfather of neoconservativism Kristol also feared, that if there isn’t a political vanguard to offer the growing counter-culture, the middle class may certainty fall to what Rothbard called “frenzied nihilists” of the left, in the last years of Rothbard’s life he split with the Libertarian party to formulate, with his colleague Lew Rockwell, creating a fringe political philosophy called Paleo-Libertarianism. It was all but a subbranch of the broader appeal of right wing libertarianism, adding a more reactionary script as an offering, very much like Rothbard’s fear that a conservative middle class would descend into a postmodern, anti-natural order of leftwing egalitarianism. Hence leading to chaos throughout Western civilization, to which Rockwell in his 1990 Essay Manifesto “The Case for PaleoLibertarianism” elaborating further on Rothbard’s deep fear that a natural order could collapse if the socialists and the left wing are given any attempt at equalizing all of society.
“They [ the left] seek to construct a cultural canon that is sexually and racially “balanced,” meaning unbalanced in every other sense. Yet on these cultural matters, too many libertarians agree with the Left. Libertarians have to catch up with the American people, who are fed up with modernism in arts, literature, and manners that is really an attack on the West. Consider the outcry against the government-subsidized pomography and sacrilege of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. The people knew instinctively that America’s taxfunded art establishment is devoted to offending bourgeois sensibilities…Pornographic photography,“free”thinking, chaotic painting, atonal music, deconstructionist literature, Bauhaus architecture, and modernist films have nothing in common with the libertarian political agenda—no matter how much individual libertarians may revel in them. In addition to their aesthetic and moral disabilities, these “art forms” are political liabilities outside Berkeley and Greenwich Village.”
Lew Rockwell, The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism” (1990)
Paleo-Libertarianism was an attempt at reselling of the 1960s old right movement of its anti-interventionist, small government, social authority and upholding traditional values. Rockwell’s 1990 manifesto set a precedence, in trying to bridge libertarianism idealisms to a more right wing focus at the dawn of a digital age, yet it would have been hard pressed in relating the ideas of old right ‘libertarianism’ and the late Rothbard’s individualistic capitalism to a younger generation. Particularly the so called Generation X’s, that were the first wave to insinuate the digital age of entrepreneurship as it began accessing multiple marketplaces. Yet, as America had two terms under George W. Bush throughout the 2000’s, who could be considered akin to Irving Kristol’s neoconservative ideal President, not only instigated America as a powerful militaristic nation, but also focused on domestic affairs in traditional conservative viewpoints. Formulating threats to America as a justification in reimposing the cold war imperialistic influences throughout the world, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center (September 11th 2001) – the War on Terror had began. However, Bush’s new found war and American militarism, ended up shifting attention abroad rather than galvanizing Krisrol’s My Cold War home battle cry and the pleading of right wing libertarianism’s fear of a moral collapse within America, such as what Rothbard’s and Rockwell’s paleoconservatism defines.
Cults of the Culture Wars (part 2) – January 20, 2021 (A Glass)
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