Hunter Wallace Settles Accounts with Libertarianism

“Raimondo, Libertarians, and Paleos”
from Occidental Dissent, May 28, 2009

As I pointed out to Evan McLaren last night, the disabling of the comment section at Takimag was about more than simple irritation with Captainchaos and friends trolling multiple threads. Justin Raimondo, John Zmirak, Paul Gottfried and others who write for that website have long held racialists in contempt (Tom Fleming at Chronicles is another) and used the opportunity created by the discord to purge our discourse from their environs.

Check out this new emotional outburst from Justin Raimondo aimed at the mild-mannered Jared Taylor. Politics makes strange bedfellows. There is something odd about an atheist libertarian homosexual engaged in an interracial relationship invoking “his legacy” of Christianity and conservatism in Randroid spittle to damn racialists. Ayn Rand famously hated both of them. Lawrence Auster was correct when he pointed out the other day that libertarianism/Objectivism is the purest negation of traditional conservatism which is about the preservation of larger wholes. Libertarians and Objectivists strive to abolish/neuter/level all higher social orders (race, ethny, nation, culture, faith, family) with their prescription of anarchy and their ideological poison of radical atomistic individualism.

Sound familiar? It should. Raimondo is correct when he quotes Buchanan in saying we come from different traditions. The pink banner he holds aloft is precisely the same one that was carried by the hippie/beatnik counterculture in the 50’s and 60’s, the antiwar movement of the 60’s, and the gay rights movement of the 70’s and 80’s. His social movement was pioneered during the twentieth century by radical Jews such as Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, F. A. Hayek, and Abbie Hoffman. It is a spiritual cousin of communism and has the same wrecking ball, destabilizing, disorienting effect upon white gentile culture at all levels. Oddly enough, Raimondo manages to accuse racialists of soulless materialism when it is precisely his form of unfettered consumer capitalism and its pornographic expressivist ethos that has disfigured the American landscape from coast to coast and continues to inspire our nihilistic youth to carve out piercings and kitsch tattoos into their pale flesh on a daily basis.

In Raimondo’s mind, only the rootless, autonomous individual exists; the implication being that only individual accomplishment can be a source of pride. For him it makes no sense to take pride in one’s race, family, ethnic group, nation, faith, or culture or to be concerned with the maintenance of these collective entities. He doesn’t conceive of art or science as practices in which the individual contributes to, builds upon, orients himself toward, finds meaning in centuries old traditions. As a libertarian, Raimondo acknowledges no debt to the past. As a homosexual, he has no reason to care about the plight of future generations. All he cares about are the almost nonexistent restraints on his “liberty” in contemporary America.

The White Nationalist project is simple enough to understand. It can be boiled down to fourteen words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” What is objectionable about that? It is nothing more than a plea for the right to exist. It is not an injunction to lord over anyone. The whole Third World is flooding into the West. In contrast, what are libertarians demanding at this historical juncture? The quixotic abolition of the state, a state of anarchy or near lawlessness, all because the amount of freedom they now enjoy (which is near absolute) apparently isn’t enough for them to satisfy their most carnal appetites. What a pitiful, pathetic, contemptible worldview.

It should come as no surprise then that the denizens of libertarianism come from the most sordid corners of American life. Walter Block once wrote a book defending his laissez-faire constituency: the prostitute looking to ply her trade, the drug addict in search of his next fix, the homosexual who resents being labeled deviant, the habitual litterer who disrespects public property, the slumlord who exploits the poor, the libeler who maligns others, the Jewish usurer, the scab who breaks the picket line, the corporate shark who exports jobs overseas, the illegal alien who violates our national borders, and others amongst this case of “heroes” who stand to benefit from the end of the rule of law and final abolition of all restraint. In Raimondo’s bizarro world, the decent and indecent have switched places: the man who takes pride in his race, the man who puts the long term interest of future generations above satiating his every whim, is now to be the object of cultural opprobrium, not the libertine iconoclast who flaunts every custom, tradition, and authority in the name of his ineffable “rights.”

How on earth did a degenerate homosexual cosmopolitan like Justin Raimondo of all people come to be identified with hardcore cultural conservatives whose animating collectivist impulses are anathema to everything urbane libertines stand for? It all goes back to a “populist” political strategy first articulated by Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell over a dozen years ago: libertarians would co-opt the electoral energy and funds of the isolationist paleocons and race-conscious rednecks on the far right as a leadership class and then redirect them towards “anti-statist” ends.  This electoral strategy finally bore fruit in the so-called “Ron Paul Revolution” last year which most racialists were fooled en masse into supporting.

Buchanan and the paleocons adopted a similar strategy in the 1990’s. In Buchanan’s own words, “The way to do battle with David Duke is not to go ballistic because Duke, as a teenager, paraded around in a Nazi costume to protest William Kunstler during Vietnam, or to shout to the heavens that Duke had the same number last year as the Ku Klux Klan. Everybody in Metairie knew that. The way to deal with Mr. Duke is the way the GOP dealt with the far more formidable challenge of George Wallace. Take a hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues; and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles.”

Raimondo has never been able to mask his hostility towards racially conscious whites. It is a common attitude among the paleos and libertarians found outside the mainstream right. They want the page views, subscriptions, money, and votes of racialists, which they correctly perceive as a burgeoning movement ideally harnessed for their own ends, but not their input. White Nationalists are supposed to stay in their seats at the back of the far right bus while their self-imagined social betters occupy the driver seat; a situation analogous to the relationship between the GOP and evangelicals. “The rantings of losers living in their parents’ basement”  are not welcome in polite company (this doesn’t include pimple faced, pudgy libertoon high school students), but by all means do send in your $100 contribution to Ron Paul’s campaign coffers and vote for him in the Republican primaries.

The White Nationalist message has never been more prescient or warranted than it is today. Its predictions are coming true. While Barack Obama appoints a professional Hispanic to the Supreme Court and distributes race-based patronage to his multitude of supporters from the White House, Raimondo counsels whites to cling to the ridiculous fantasy of colorblindness in a color conscious world; we need more “individualism,” more “liberty.” Meanwhile, the other side pushes ahead for more ”diversity,” more “multiculturalism” in every aspect of life. It’s like the Polish calvary fighting the Wehrmacht.  Anyone with half a brain can see where this is going, what the end result will inevitably be for whites, unless more responsible men act.

White Nationalists need to shove aside Justin Raimondo and the rest of the libertarian fringe. Their retarded fantasy of dismembering the state is nothing but a distracting panacea. Discrediting the “Alternative Right” will be the first step for racialists in the years ahead. Raimondo and his associates should be confronted at every opportunity and exposed as the cowards, liars, impostors, and opportunists that they are.

Update: Some negative reaction to Raimondo’s article here and here.