A response to Phillip Blond, David Brooks and "civic nationalist"/alt-right apologia

This post is a response to https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/shattered-society, from the perspective of a Christian anarcho-libertarian.

I have placed the author's quotes in italics, and my responses after '>'.

____________________________________________________________________________

I. Some observations:

Red Toryism sounds like a commingling of ideas from left (Christian democrats, Christian socialism, social democracy, democratic socialism) and the right (civic nationalism, national socialism). It shares most sociological, anthropological and political ideas with the alt-right

II. What the author gets right : identification of the symptoms

"failure of politics, Left & Right"

“We are a bipolar nation,” he wrote, “a bureaucratic, centralized state that presides dysfunctionally over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered, and isolated citizenry.”

> The three paragraphs, starting from "We live in a society......" and ending in " joyful existence are being undermined." are spot on.

"A society that still had neighbors who knew one another could have created trusting communities, and they could have produced institutions that served the needs of people rather than the bureaucratic demands of a distant and hostile state."
> Again, spot on, and a core part of anarcho-libertarian sociology.

"Neither Left nor Right can offer an answer because both ideologies have collapsed as both have become the same."

> While this statement is true if out of context, in its proper context in the essay, it is a beautiful metaphor of the author's error (which I will address in section III). It is indeed true that the Left and the Right have collapsed into the same ideology, which is, in fact, socialist collectivism. The Left prefers the collectivism of classes and special interests that break traditions, the Right prefers the collectivism of races and ethnicities and special interests from certain traditions.

"But neoliberalism has delivered none of these things. It has instead produced centralization; reduction in plurality; the driving upward, not the driving downward, of opportunity, leverage, and innovation. It has re-inscribed the very things it purported to end."

> Again, the author is right, and, in being right, undermines his own main point. Neo-liberalism, with its state-sanctioned capitalism is something other than the anarcho-libertarian free market.

III. What the author gets wrong : the diagnosis

My main concern is the author's alarming lack of clarity of thought and intellectual laziness. For the moment, I will set aside my concern that the author is engaging in willful, malicious sophistry. I will return to that possibility at the end.

"Conservatives swore allegiance to the market, enthroning capitalism as arbiter of ultimate worth.". > What?! Who? When? Where?

"Those at the top have accelerated away from the rest of us by practicing a self-serving and state-sanctioned capitalism that knows no morals and exists only to finance its own excess.".

> This is the beginning of the errors. A lack of morals is not unique to the 1% (we are all sinners). What the author misses is that the oppressive and violent use of accumulated power is the proximate and instrumental cause of how the 1% have crushed the rest -- however, the extent of this power accumulation and abuse is hastened and amplified only because the rest (the 99%) have sinfully and happily, through their own moral frailty and fallenness, signed away their own power and rights to the 1% (in the spirit of Esau, or in the spirit of how the Israelites adamantly demanded a king over them, even when prophetically warned that the king would abuse them and their children, I Samuel 8:6-19). 

"But through the privileging of alternative lifestyles, the prioritizing of minority politics, and the capture of markets by monopolies, we have destroyed the sustained and sustaining society."

> he misses the key point : the underlined should be re-written as "the capture, manipulation and destruction of markets by State-financed, State-backed monopolies"!

The loss of our culture is best understood as the disappearance of civil society. Only two powers remain: the state and the market. We no longer have, in any effective independent way, local government, churches, trade unions, cooperative societies, or civic organizations that operate on the basis of more than single issues. In the past, these institutions were a means for ordinary people to exercise power. Now mutual communities have been replaced with passive, fragmented individuals. Civil spaces have either vanished or become subject-domains of the dictatorial state or the monopolized market.

> As long States exists, free markets do not. Markets that are limited in their freedom do exist (thank God!) and have led to an unprecedented decline in poverty worldwide (again, thank God!), no thanks to and in spite of the intervening State(s). When the author says "Civil spaces have either vanished or become subject-domains of the dictatorial state or the monopolized market.", he misses the main point that those two necessarily go hand-in-hand and together. The latter exists because of the former.

"Neither Left nor Right can offer an answer because both ideologies have collapsed as both have become the same. " all the way to the paragraph starting with "The 1960s New Left...". 

> In this, the author makes two grave errors : (a) he mis-construes the socio-political oscillation as between Left-wing collectivism and Right-wing individualism. This is false. The oscillation is between Left-wing collectivism and Right-wing collectivism. (b) Further, and most important to this critique, the author makes the fatal error of defining and equating libertarianism and anarchism as left-wing cultural libertinism. This is the central straw man.

"The contemporary Right all too often believes exactly the same thing, but expresses it through economics. The dominant actor for right-wing theory is the self-interested individual...."

> There are many levels of confusion here. For the time-being, let us assume that the author equates the contemporary Right with his straw-man of anarchistic-libertarianism (which is the only way the rest of his so-called "argument" is internally consistent). Combined with the previous paragraph's ending line "oneself as an isolated, atomistic agent.", another oft-repeated straw-man, the author implies a false dichotomy and betrays a grave inability to distinguish between the two distinct fields of economics and ethics.

(at this point, I tired of continuing).

IV. Some conclusions

The alt-right / civic nationalists seek community, traditions, institutions and ties that bind. This is a good yearning. However, the State (and Statist collectivism) is opposed to all this and destroys it explicitly and implicitly. The civic nationalists miss this entirely in their embrace of collectivism, which they, confusingly, one at the same time, also condemn. Further, the civic nationalists misguidedly rail against libertarians as individualists, mis-characterizing them as seeking atomic autonomy -- which is a feature of the libertine Left. Anarcho-libertarians understand that human beings live and flourish in community, including hierarchic communities. They simply correctly understand the State to be the anti-thesis of community.