As expected, I’ve had several readers approach me with questions, concerns, thoughts, and counterarguments to my piece on the Mises Caucus. This follow up piece is intended to address these as well as cover additional areas I believe I missed in the original piece. There may be others as well; if this becomes a series, I will place a list with links to all of them in each piece.
Counterargument: We Need To Do More Than Just Oppose The Mises Caucus
I agree completely! I may have failed to emphasize this enough in the original piece, though I did mention that continuing to maintain the party through the process of ridding ourselves of the Mises Caucus.
There are organizations within the party, such as the Classical Liberal Caucus (of which I am a founding member and was briefly Vice Chair), that are doing a great job of organizing around a positive message focused on offering voters practical solutions and maintaining a connection to our party’s intellectual heritage, and I fully support such efforts.
We absolutely should continue to recruit, continue to run people for office (both internal party offices and public office), and continue to sell the libertarian message to voters.
That said, it will continue to be more difficult to do those things until we solve the problem of the Mises Caucus. They will absolutely block vote to ensure that they occupy every single position within the party that they can. And there will be no effective way to work around this so long as those who oppose them won’t oppose them openly.
Counterargument: A Blanket Condemnation Of The Mises Caucus Is Collectivism
This is nonsense, and I’ll use an example to show the point before explaining it. If today, I willingly joined the Nazi Party (if such a thing even exists in modern America), would you withhold judgment of me, as an individual, for doing that? What about the Communist Party? What if I joined an angry street mob to beat someone to death?
Collectivism is when you reduce an individual to being a member of some unchosen group, regardless of their own individual values, decisions, and actions. Examples of this would be judging someone based on their race, genetics, or national origin. In the mind of a collectivist, the individual’s own actions are irrelevant and can never refute the assumptions made based on their group membership.
Judging someone for their willing membership in a voluntary organization is not collectivism. Such organizations are formed with the purpose of coordinating action; joining and supporting an organization is an individual decision that reflects on someone as an individual.
Every member of the Mises Caucus has seen all of the things I outlined in my previous article, and none of that has caused them to exit the organization. That, too, is an individual decision, and one they could reverse at any moment and choose not to.
We are all responsible for our individual actions. Just like the individual cannot escape the morality of their behavior by delegating it to the state, they also cannot do so by delegating it to any other organization.
Counterargument: Different Individuals Have Different Experiences With The Mises Caucus
They all still block voted for the current leadership. They contribute money to the organization that is currently running the party into the ground. They still help them recruit MAGA and alt-right people rather than libertarian-minded people.
I know it’s hard to develop a real, personal relationship with someone and then stand against them. It’s incredibly hard. But we have to be honest with ourselves about the actions they take and their consequences, even if they are sincere true believers who think they are doing what is best.
The greatest weapon in the Mises Caucus arsenal, which they have weaponized as fully as they can, is people’s general willingness to take others at their word and assume the best of them, and people’s unwillingness to engage in conflict.
They will block you from everywhere they can (social media, leadership within the party, etc.) the moment you openly critique their behavior, and them shamelessly join the chorus of “both sides are bad” and “stop the infighting” when someone’s conflict avoidance gets the best of them. My original piece was largely intended to be an antidote to this.
Imagine how easy it would be to win a war if you could convince the other side that you’re in favor of peace while shooting at them. That’s the game they play.
Counterargument: Infighting Is Why We Can’t Get Anything Done
My first response to this would be that we still have some great candidates running for office right now, unimpeded by the current party drama. Chase Oliver and Shane Hazel both had great showings at recent debates. So frankly, this just isn’t true.
My second response would be that we can’t get anything done if our party is run completely into the ground either. To use an analogy, a defensive war is absolutely a drain on a country’s economy; it would always be better to not have to fight one. That said, generally when one is in that position, your options are “fight a defensive war” or “cease to exist”; one does not have the option of not fighting a war and then continuing existence as normal.
This is the position the Libertarian Party is in right now. We don’t have the option of “not infighting”; that option amounts to “cease to exist”. This is existential.
I have to emphasize, especially to newer party members, that this is not normal infighting. Libertarians are argumentative and that will likely never change.
This is different. This is an outside group intentionally transforming the party into something different, effectively killing off the party many of us have donated a lot of time and money and energy to. They’ll probably kill it off proper, too, whether they intend to or not.
Paleolibertarianism
One angle I failed to cover much in the original piece is paleolibertarianism and the role it has played in the formation of the Mises Caucus. I felt that including it in the original piece would have ruined the flow, since there is a lot to cover. Wikipedia has a surprisingly good article on the subject, but I will attempt to summarize here as well.
In the early days of what could be called the modern American libertarian movement, one of the central figures was the economist and philosopher Murray Rothbard. He would reformulate the non-aggression principle (first defined by Ayn Rand) into an axiom (not grounded in any deeper set of abstractions or principles) and then try to develop a political philosophy completely consistent with it.
He coined the term anarcho-capitalism to describe his point of view, which has since been used by several libertarian thinkers who favor a stateless society operating with a private property model, including many who disagree with Rothbard on key points.
He even helped form the very party I’m hoping to help save with these pieces. That said, later in his career, particularly the 90s, he took a hard turn to the political right. He began to form intentional alliances with the paleoconservative movement and adopted more socially conservative stances. His piece on the subject is still widely available.
Probably the most famous and contentious figure of the paleolibertarian movement is Rothbard’s student Hans-Hermann Hoppe. If you’ve seen the memes about physical removal, Hoppe is their origin point.
Ideologically speaking, it would probably be more accurate to call the Mises Caucus the Hoppe Caucus, since the ideas they tend to espouse are much more in line with Hoppe. In their mythology, Rothbard iterated on Mises, and Hoppe iterated on Rothbard; those areas where Hoppe and Mises disagreed (and there are many) are areas where Mises simply failed to apply his own principles consistently.
I won’t attempt to provide a full detailing of Hoppe’s philosophy here (I would recommend his books Democracy: The God That Failed and A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism for that), but I can give a summation.
Hoppe favors an anarcho-capitalist model of society. There is no state, but there is private property, and society is made up of a large patchwork of intentional covenant communities. These communities are voluntary and made up of willing members who agreed to the rules and the consequences of not following them in advance.
He believed that the key problem of ethics is one of time preference; that is, ethical behavior consists in taking actions that will produce the right outcomes in the long term, foregoing short term gains, pleasure, hedonism, etc. in favor of a disciplined and intentional approach to life.
Where things start to get off the rails is when one looks at what he considers to be hedonistic or short-term behavior. He has explicitly stated that, in libertarian covenant communities, people preaching ideas like democracy or homosexuality should be physically removed, by force if necessary, in order to maintain a libertarian social order.
A key idea in paleolibertarian thought is that a truly free society can only be maintained if conservative social norms are enforced via means that are technically libertarian (in that they comply with a very bare and strict interpretation of the non-aggression principle, unhindered by other values or priorities) but which put people in a very uncomfortable position if they do not conform. The idea is that society will be undone if people are allowed to live hedonistically or embrace values contrary to long term survival and flourishing.
This is, in my view, the key area where paleolibertarianism really breaks away from other forms of libertarianism. Hoppe explicitly rejects the notion of “live and let live”; his vision for a libertarian society is not one in which people can generally live the kind of life they want, but one in which society is maximally compliant with the non-aggression principle, regardless of the output. Social conservatism, enforced in NAP-compliant ways, is the means by which this is ensured.
This inherently puts them at odds with libertarians that are not anarchists, who think democracy is better than the alternatives, and who think that the end goal is a free society rather than a NAP-compliant one (such that the NAP is a tool for achieving freedom, rather than freedom simply being defined as NAP-compliance).
This is why they will not abide the Dallas Accord and will say openly anarchist things from official social media accounts. This is why they, like the paleoconservatives, will take the side of Russia, usually implicitly; they will oppose Putin or Russia when pressed but never at any other time and while expending 10x the effort to peddle anti-Ukraine propaganda straight from the Kremlin’s mouth.
This is why socially conservative ideas that are generally considered anathema to libertarianism, such as attacks on homosexuality, are much more prevalent among their ranks. While most of their membership has probably absorbed this from exposure to other members, rather than reading Hoppe directly, a majority of them could likely be described as Hoppeans.