After getting beat in the head with libertarian ideology on nearly every page, I feel as indoctrinated as a young schoolboy reciting the pledge of allegiance! Libertarianism, I’ve learned, is the belief that society attains a harmonious whole from, paradoxically, the fierce and unconstrained competition among self-interested individuals. Apparently libertarians like the author are not bothered in the least by this strange contradiction at the heart of their ideology. I find that says a lot about the decidedly crude and limited thinking that informs this perspective generally, at least as it is presented in this book.
What a strange patchwork book it is. The title was misleading in that it was less about explaining the alt-right phenomenon, than it was championing and expounding the principles of libertarianism. But hey. I learned a lot from all the digressions. For instance the author goes into random state practices of the early 20th century, including about 75 pages devoted to American eugenics policies, which the author, unconvincingly, passes as a kind of premonitory parallel to contemporary environmental policies. I really don’t find these to be commensurable phenomenon at all. But the author seems to think the contemporary consensus on climate change and environmental degradation to be suspect . . . in the same way the pseudo-science backing eugenics policies was eventually discredited. An ideologically motivated exaggeration? Of course not. “Genuine liberalism . . . probably shouldn’t be classified as ideology at all” (pg. 190). Right.
That kind of rough gloss over utterly distinct historical contexts seems to me actually quite symptomatic of the flippant and crude distortions (e.g., equations of Left and Right, of Social Democracy and Fascism, among others) that inform libertarianism, as I’ve understood it reading this. The presupposition is always that of an isolated and strangely decontextualized individual in search of freedom and fulfillment in, of all places, the market: that roiling force field of compulsions leveled incessantly, brutally, against poorly situated individuals the world over. Perhaps the “market” (a kind of loose metonymy for the planetary system of contemporary capitalism) is more accurately thought of, to borrow an incredible formulation from historian Moishe Postone, as a form of abstract, impersonal social domination, and thus no friend of general human happiness, freedom, or creativity.
Though the author is certainly willing to forget about the massive and growing populations of people today who appear utterly superfluous to that system, their labor unmarketable, and yet their existence wholly contingent on it, there being no chance for self-sufficiency in a world of ubiquitous property. The market, it’s not hard to see, does not exist to directly meet human needs. That of course happens, but more as a by-product to a kind of semi-autonomous end-in-itself whose true aim is to turn money into more money. Only from a libertarian viewpoint does this appear as a wholly unmixed blessing . . .
Surely the market is to be praised for neutralizing older forms of personal and direct domination (e.g., feudalism). But that does not make the market and the states that guarantee its smooth functioning (even libertarians like the author concede the state’s necessity for a functioning market) forces of liberation. My problem with libertarianism, especially with this author’s gloating recount of its historical victories, is that it only counts the blessings of capitalism’s development, while turning a blind eye entirely to its dramatic—intensive and extensive—shortcomings for human dignity and, yes, freedom.
Had the author not been so preoccupied with libertarian self-promotions (“Here is magic. Here is beauty. Here is true heroism.”!) he may have had a chance to explore the connection between the darker right wing trajectories emerging today and the increasing inability of advanced states and the global market at large to provide for the needs of an increasing mass of individuals. In other words, he may have pondered how the free market is perhaps not the immutable and always-unequivocal solution to the resurgence of bizarre fascist ideologies, but also, at the same time, their cause. The same was true in the deep undertow of economic depression that catalyzed Germany’s (resistible) devolution into Nazism.
But to this author, other political viewpoints are all, apparently, equatable to fascism at some deeper level or, at the least, to authoritarian programs of social control. I beg to differ. I certainly agree with the author that in the coming decades advanced nations will likely be faced with the enormous challenge of filling the void left by the growing dysfunction of political solutions to the contemporary crises of this modern global system. But I don’t think deregulating the markets is the magic solution. Doing so will only further our journey down a constricting pathway whose endpoint is barbaric desocialization.
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![Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty by [Jeffrey Tucker, Deirdre McCloskey]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51JTXjH0vDL._SY346_.jpg)
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Unfortunately the content is a dis-organized mess.
Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2021
As a concerned American with what I believe to befairly middle of the road political views...and very concerned about what I believe to be a veryleftward Socialist lurch of American government I bought Jeff Tucker’s book to better understand the political elements of the political “Alt Right”, NAZI media references to US Government and Current Society.Tucker’s book is a disorganized mess that has been no help to me.I believe he has thrown this stuff together because he feels like (and is probably correct) that here is a large market of people like me that have my same questions.This book did nothing to answer them.
Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2021
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Distorting evidence to suit the authors TDS
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