Response to “The Libertarian Case for Donald Trump”

A Response to Cantwell’s “Libertarian Case For Donald Trump”

The article this piece is directed at can be found here.

Allow me to preface this article with the statement that I have long listened to Christopher Cantwell and have enjoyed much of his work. I agree with the man on many issues, particularly the idea that the left is eroding traditional values and that unchecked immigration from the third-world is a dire problem. However, I think he is mistaken for supporting Donald Trump, because Trump will not solve these problems. Nay, he may make them worse.

Cantwell begins:

Let’s start off by stating the obvious. Democracy is a terrible system, which invariably initiates force against peaceful people. It will always elect violent rulers by a vote of many stupid people who are incapable of comprehending the consequences of the policies they support. Consequently, all elections have horrible outcomes, regardless of who wins them. I have no doubt, the next president of the United States, whomever he (or she) may be, will do terrible things.

The orthodox libertarian position on political candidates is thus, needless to say, they are all irredeemably evil. It doesn’t matter if the candidate is Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or Rand Paul. They will all initiate force on a scale so grand it boggles the mind, and we would all thusly prefer that no presidential powers existed, negating the necessity for an election.

Sadly, democracy has not been abolished as of yet, and such a goal is terribly unlikely to be accomplished prior to the November 2106 election. Chances are, a president will be elected next year. Chances are,  that president will initiate force. Chances are, that force will have catastrophic consequences.

To no surprise, I find myself in agreement with Cantwell. Democracy is not without its flaws and it is an unfortunate reality that there will be a president. No disagreement thus far.

So one is left to choose between four basic options.

  1. Support a candidate who will do things which are unlibertarian, but is less harmful than the other candidates.
  2. Support a candidate who will do things which are so unlibertarian that society will be irreparably harmed and the government will collapse that we might rule the wasteland.
  3. Support a libertarian candidate who has absolutely no chance of winning
  4. Renounce elections as unprincipled, wield zero influence, and remain in a powerless echochamber of libertarian autism.

I choose option number one, and I frankly think you’re a useless moron if you choose any of the other three. The notion that libertarians ought to remain completely uninfluential and powerless is a theory being floated by people who have no desire to see us succeed in anything.

This is where I disagree. Cantwell ignores a few things here:

1.)  You can’t know for sure a candidate will honor his or her promises. Especially in the past, this candidate was arguably as bad as Hillary Clinton, if not worse. You have no contract or binding promise from Donald Trump that he will not change his mind nor do you have proof he will honor his pledges should they get in the way of him accomplishing his goals. Remember, Trump has stated he is not above making deals with the left, a sentiment Cantwell has resented in the past, to accomplish his goals. Is it unreasonable to assume this won’t happen again once he’s placed in a position of power? Bottom line: We can’t know for sure if any of these candidates will be less harmful than the others, much less if they have a record of flip-flopping to advance their interests.

2.)  There are many anarchist groups who would want this to happen, but I don’t agree with them. This is a poor choice.

3.) This is perhaps the biggest oversimplification Cantwell puts forward, because he is ignoring state and local elections. I, for example, live in California. There is very little I can do to support Trump, mainly because California will send a Democrat to the electoral college no matter what I do. During the primaries, perhaps it would matter, but only if you’re a member of the state’s dominant party. Other than that, it doesn’t for many, many people.

4.) There is some truth to this, but again, it oversimplifies the problem. There are many things people can do to better themselves and their surrounding areas outside of elections. They can focus their time and energy in investing in stocks, they could grow crops and make their property self-sufficient. Maybe if they’re rebellious they’ll practice agorism and become black marketeers. So, to be fair, you may not ward off the state, but you will be advancing the ideas of self-sufficiency and independence in a way. It’s not as useful as organizing political action, but it’s not useless either.

There is an option Cantwell ignored.

5.) Since not everyone can influence the results by voting in the general presidential elections, support local candidates. Volunteer for campaigns. Maybe even run one yourself. You don’t have to support a presidential candidate, especially if you’re living in a hardcore blue state. There are local elections where you’d be much more influential in than the presidential election.

Let me clue you all into a little known secret of the universe. Power, not principles, guide societies. When a predator charges toward you, you do not ready your argumentation ethics and denounce him as a moral criminal. You do not post to Facebook about what a sellout he is. You do not post memes about how silly it would be to join the criminal class and change it from within.

You shoot him.

He sought to use force against you, and you, if you wish to survive, must use force against him. You must do so in a way that overwhelms his ability to wield force, up to and including ending his life.

The idea that the dynamic somehow changes once democracy gets involved is patently ridiculous. For years, I have called for insurrection. I have dedicated nearly all of my time to promoting a violent overthrow of government and a continued culture of resistance which would prevent the establishment of a new one. Those calls have not only been ignored, they have been vehemently resisted, smeared, and dishonestly attacked by other self described libertarians. Yet, if one wanted to bring about a libertarian order in a perfectly libertarian manner, this would be the only way to accomplish that goal.

I am convinced, after years of struggling, that this will not happen. At least not without a number of prerequisites. I believe Donald Trump will help to meet the most important of those prerequisites.

Donald Trump may meet a number of these prerequisites. But again, he might not. You don’t know what Trump will do. He may do a 180 in office and reveal his inner progressive once again. He’s done it before. Were he a principled man with decades of standing for the same conservative principles, maybe I’d agree with Cantwell. Ironically, he has stood for principles during his lifetime, but they weren’t conservative or even right leaning.

The utter destruction of the left is a prerequisite of revolution, or any positive social change.

I know it is popular amongst libertarians to say that “It doesn’t matter if the boot on your neck is a left boot or a right boot” and perhaps this may have been true at some point in human history. Today however, it is a patently ridiculous notion.

Today, left wing influence is threatening our very existence. Subsidized mass immigration displaces libertarianism’s core demographic with socialists, communists, and theocrats. Public education is dumbing down the populace. The welfare state is destroying the family unit. Political correctness not only threatens “free speech”, it removes entire categories of information from observation in political discourse and scientific inquiry. Feminism and gender confusion is subsidized and promoted, along with birth control and abortion, causing more familial disconnect, declining birthrates, and demographic decline.

These patterns are not only absolutely unsustainable, they are an immediate danger to our safety in the present moment. Right now, students in prestigious universities like Yale, are panicking because they think Halloween costumes are racist. They cannot tell the difference between rape and a hangover. Rice is cultural appropriation. The list goes on, and these lunatics are not a simple sideshow for us to mock. They will eventually graduate from these universities and become Presidents, Senators, Governors, and captains of industry. They have some of the most insanely dangerous ideas, and they will be our rulers in a few short years if they are not stopped.

There is legitimate criticism amongst libertarians and conservatives that Donald Trump is not a slash and burn antigovernment right winger or constitutionalist. He doesn’t want to abolish social security, the welfare state, medicare or medicaid. He doesn’t want to reduce the size of the military, though he is far more hesitant to use it than many would give him credit for.

With economics being the primary complaint amongst libertarians about the left, you might thus find yourself asking what he would do to defeat liberalism, and I respond as follows.

The all too common libertarian idea that we are conservative on economic issues and liberal on social issues is a fallacy which has sadly gained entirely too much traction. We are not liberal on social issues, we just want to let the market sort out the positives and negatives of human interaction. Drug use, promiscuity, feminism, homosexuality, racial and cultural diversity are all social negatives which would, and for many centuries were, discouraged by the market.

Promoting these behaviors as virtuous is a consequence of liberal economic policies and general societal degradation brought upon us by said policies. We are not freeing ourselves by smoking marijuana and letting other guys fuck our girlfriends, we are in fact responding to the stimuli of our enslavement, and helping to further perpetuate it.

When leftists scream “racist” or “sexist” or “homophobe” at their opponents, it doesn’t make a spec of difference whether or not they are explicitly endorsing the State taking action against the people they hurl these epithets at. They are repeating government propaganda, the aim of which is to outlaw the discrimination which has always served as a market deterrent to degenerate behavior and cultural decline.

They want unchecked debauchery, irresponsibility, and reality detachment, because this makes for a more easily ruled civilization. If Bruce Jenner can become a woman, or Rachel Dolezal can become black, then the concept that human beings have a nature is undermined. Popular opinion and government decrees can take the place of obvious truths, and once one is willing to accept that sort of thought process, communism is not far off. After all, if human beings have no nature, then there are no economic laws aside from those set by the State.

What Donald Trump does to offset this is incredibly small, but it is more than we have seen from anyone else in my lifetime. He completely neutralizes this aspect of left wing influence. Between his rhetoric on immigration, his statements about Muslims, his willingness to retweet racial crime statistics, white genocide, and other things which seem quite shocking by modern standards of political discourse, he has made himself the hated target of every left wing outfit of note, including those who falsely portray themselves right wing like Glenn Beck, Fox News, and the National Review.

Any other candidate, commentator, or person of any sort of interest who came under such attacks would have long ago backpedaled and signaled and apologized for fear of being financially and politically ruined, if not assassinated. Instead, Trump continues to double down. More importantly, he remains successful while doing so, proving irrefutably that these ridiculous smears are meaningless and one can not only survive such attacks without apology, but can stand a very real chance of ascending to the presidency of the United States.

This neutralizes the entire structure of the left wing media. The system of propaganda that hammers us day in and day out with liberal bullshit is rendered powerless by an openly racist billionaire who insults powerful people with impunity.

There is much Cantwell says here that I agree with. I believe in conservative values like sobriety, honestly, individualism, and the nuclear family. I do not believe all cultures can co-exist peacefully, especially when they are diametrically opposed and forced to share the same property. Because of this, I see unchecked immigration and subsidized importation of refugees from the third world as problematic. Finally, I agree that political correctness on the left is ruining the fabric of the nation, but I still disagree that Trump will fix these problems.

My concern about Trump is that he doesn’t behave like someone who is ardently defending himself and his beliefs. He behaves like someone who doesn’t care how much you attack his beliefs because they aren’t his. Look at how he responds to criticism. He doesn’t respond logically and attempt to refute his critics. He dismisses and insults them. This might be funny, but it’s not generally how someone who is secure responds to attacks.

I could be wrong. Trump could have taken the red pill and had an epiphany. But the bottom line is that neither of us can prove he did. We only know what his past behavior is, and that he’s worked with Democrats and liberals to get things he wanted done. I don’t much like the idea of compromising with Marxists to get ahead and I’m sure Cantwell doesn’t either.

Aside from this, Trump is a businessman and an actor. He’s mastered telling people what they want to hear, regardless of whether or not he believes it himself. This doesn’t prove he’s being deceptive, but in conjunction with his liberal donation record, it indicates he could be.

Cantwell goes on to describe how the left and social justice warriors have infested the libertarian movement and that their policies are detrimental to us as a species. Though I question to what degree Reason, National Review and Cato are left wing, he makes compelling points elsewhere on how the problems of political correctness and debauchery are slowly degrading the country.

Where I disagree with Cantwell, once more, is his belief Trump will correct the problem.

Donald Trump’s open racial awareness, advocacy of immigration restrictions, and attacks on the left wing media are a call to arms for the left. They are shouting from the rooftops “all hands on deck” and it is working spectacularly. Nothing works so well for spotting a leftist as seeing how vigorously they denounce Donald Trump. His policies by comparison to his opponents are really not all that extreme, but his attitude is decidedly right wing and it scares the living hell out of leftists that right wing attitudes could again become popularized because this would mean they had actual political opposition.

If the left had political opposition, they would have less time and resources to dedicate toward destroying libertarianism. Libertarianism will never get anywhere if it does not deal with its leftist invasion. We are and will always be rightly viewed by the left as enemies of their economic plans, alliances with them serve only to undermine our own goals. We are sadly, and wrongly, viewed by the right as left wing childish retards who will never accomplish anything, and this is entirely due to our left wing alliances. Right wingers who read Hoppe or Rothbard would largely be sympathetic to our goals. Right wingers who are called “whorephobic” and racist by the Buehlers and Reisenwitzs of the world will sadly dump us all into the same category of ovenworthy nonsense.

Trump is not a conservative, he’s a RINO at best. He does not respect the private property of others (eminent domain, calling Snowden a traitor, etc). He does not value laissez-faire capitalism or competition. Trump has no problem using the state to crush his opposition, an observable phenomenon where corporations use left-wing politicians to destroy their competitors. Trump was in bed with those corporations and the same politicians they used.

The only difference between Trump, Graham and Bush, is that Trump ran the show. He used the politicians to do his bidding and advance his own interests. I agree with Cantwell that it’s nice to see the left squirm, but it’s not just the left, it’s the right.

Who stands to gain the most from Trump’s nomination?

The right wing media? Nope. Their viewership is split. If they bash Trump, half of their audience hates it. If they praise Trump, the other half hates it. If they ignore him, no one watches them. Cantwell and I are perfect examples of this. I am a fan of Cantwell’s show, following him since before his endorsement of Trump. I like his views on culture, society, philosophy, and politics. Now that Trump is in the race, someone I saw eye-to-eye with on most issues suddenly finds themselves at odds with me. The outlets must now choose which of us to please, and chances are, the one of us it doesn’t choose will take our business elsewhere.

The Republican establishment? They lost their primary Neocon candidates. They’ve already been hurt by Trump. He stoll 42% of their audience. Once again, I’m happy to see them hurting, but I don’t like the guy who’s doing it either.

Libertarians? Maybe. On one hand, Trump gobbled up a lot of Ron Paul‘s former audience, along with Bernie Sanders. That hurt the possibility of more and more people flocking to third parties. We’ll get into why this benefits the Democrats in a minute. However, they benefit on the off-chance Trump gets the nomination, those who are disenfranchised with both the Republican establishment and Trump may find themselves voting third party.

The only group to stand to benefit from Trump running is the Democratic establishment and the left wing media. It may look like the left-wing media hates Trump, but you have to think about what MSNBC, CNN, and other left leaning outlets are. They’re corporations, not moral or immoral, but amoral. At the end of the day, they only care about money. Some of the execs may have left-leaning views, some may not, but they have chosen Democrats and liberals as their audience. Unlike the right, leftists all hate Trump. They can all rally around that hatred. The only thing the left-wing media needs to do is attack Trump and their audience is pleased. He’s a viewer magnet and earns them a ton of money.

The Democratic establishment loves Trump too, because he’s the only candidate who loses to Hillary in match-up polls. Even at his best, the RCP average polls show Clinton ahead. It’s nearly unanimous. Cruz can beat Hillary. Rubio can very easily beat Clinton. Carson is neck and neck with her, and was even beating her for a while. The only Candidate who doesn’t beat Hillary at any point on RCP is Trump. Of course, this is subject to change. But as far as the Democratic Party Machine is concerned, Trump is their best hope of getting Clinton in the White House. Not only that, but he once again he stopped whichever Democrats disliked Hillary from choosing him should they both get the nomination.

Again, I agree with much of what Cantwell says next. I agree that because of the welfare state and minimum wage laws, immigrants do not assimilate to the culture in this country well. That is why it’s important to only allow those who will assimilate in, and discourage those who won’t from coming. Cantwell argues why Trump will accomplish this.

 

Trump’s proposals for stricter immigration controls thusly accomplish two decidedly libertarian goals.

  1. Making State immigration policy more closely resemble that which a free market would create.

Not true. Trump’s policies would not resemble a free market. Trump believes in a welfare state. Trump believes in funding Planned Parenthood and other cronyist organizations. Trump does not favor international trade. These are all elements that are hostile to a free market.

  1. Saving libertarianism’s core demographic from extinction

I’m not going to call Cantwell a racist because I am well aware that the Caucasian populace is dwindling, many of whom are libertarians. Recently, I have been reading into r/K selection theory and I find it to make valid points. Again, I find myself in agreement that the government should not subsidize policies which affect the demographics of any nation. However, I do not see how Trump’s wall would solve either of these problems.

Trump’s wall will not stop immigration. It’s a rallying point, a sales pitch. He knows a lot of people don’t know that an enormous percentage of immigrants do not pass through the border, but rather fly in and overstay their visas. Additionally, many immigrants could tunnel below the border and bypass it some other way. A wall would do little to solve both of these problems.

So what should we do?

For starters, removing the welfare state and minimum wage would all but solve the problem of mass immigration. Ending the bombing and poor military tactics of Barack Obama would be another, since his bombing campaigns are what’s ramping up support for ISIS and driving refugees to the West.

In order to do this, we need to recognize what each of us as individuals can do to influence elections. Since Cantwell lives in New Hampshire, he has the fortune of influencing the presidential election with his vote. Unfortunately, there weren’t any good choices this year, regardless of what Cantwell thinks. As for myself and others who find themselves in a hardcore blue state, we can influence local and state politics. We can volunteer for campaigns, we can donate to candidates, and we can even try to run ourselves. We don’t have to be so focused on the presidential election.

Find a candidate you like, or run yourself. Chances are that most people in your local area are politically uninformed about local candidates. They don’t know much about the people who are running in their area. What better way to show them than direct voter outreach? Canvas the neighborhoods. Pass out flyers at events, and attend their speeches. You can get people politically active, gain their support, and influence their decisions, up close and personally.

In conclusion, I don’t disagree with Cantwell on much. I enjoy much of his work and even after his announcement he’s supporting Trump, I will still watch his content. However, I don’t agree with his choice in the presidential election and I hope he changes his mind. There are other battles to fight, and I don’t believe fighting alongside Trump will win them.

Follow Chris on Twitter

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