There have been a few ripples of excitement on the political right down under, following the recent New South Wales local council elections. The Libertarian Party – until recently known as the Liberal Democrats – won fifteen seats across the Premier State.
They hope to repeat this success in the State and Commonwealth elections coming up. (Queensland goes to the polls in late October, and there is a national election due around the middle of 2025).
On the face of it, there is hope in this news. The new Party’s stated, top-of-mind priorities are climate scepticism and small government. So far, so good. But there are big problems with libertarianism, as is becoming clear in our era of “global laissez faire” for business and global fascism for the rest of us. Especially when you look back at libertarianism’s golden days of the 1980s, the era of Thatcher and Reagan, and what their policies subsequently wrought. Especially in relation to the slippery slope from deregulation to globalisation, to globalism-as-an-ideology, to global techno-tyrannical governance.
This is why we shouldn’t be getting too excited about libertarianism in the 2020s.
The old left labelled 1980s free market economics as “neoliberalism’. Many on the new alt-right now also use that term, and not with that much nostalgic affection. Tucker Carlson famously stated (at the 2019 NatCon conference) that “big business hates your family”. He also disparaged the standard libertarian response when conservatives (typically) query (say) tech monopolies. In Carlson’s words, the limp libertarian response is “go start your own Google”. You get the point.
The high-profile American libertarian tech guy, Peter Thiel, wrote in his book, Zero to One, that all entrepreneurs want monopoly, not competition. True enough.
The old left, typified by John Gray (False Dawn, 1998) and Joseph Stiglitz (Globalization and Its Discontents 2002) saw globalisation as both core to the neoliberal faith AND dangerous for the world, for a range of reasons. Another, less ideological scholar, Samuel Huntington, writing in 2004 in The National Interest, lamented the emergence of globally focused American capitalist titans – “Davos men”, “dead souls” – with a declining attachment to their own country.
https://nationalinterest.org/article/dead-souls-the-denationalization-of-the-american-elite-620
This even captured the attention of an Australian Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop. She summarised Huntington in 2017 thus:
In 2004, in the middle of an unprecedented doubling of global trade by volume in the eight years from the turn of the century until the Global Financial Crisis, Samuel Huntington published an essay lamenting the "denationalisation" of American elites.
According to the political scientist, seen by many Americans as the greatest of his generation, Huntington noted the growing gap between the views of intellectual and economic elites from those held by the majority of the American public.
These elites – memorably referred to as Davos Men – championed participation in the global economy, liberalised trade and the freer movement of peoples between countries as being essential for greater economic integration.
Huntington defined the elites as "academics, international civil servants and executives in global companies, as well as successful high-technology entrepreneurs."
No doubt this included what many would describe as 'political elites', who champion the benefits of globalisation without consulting or convincing their citizens of the costs and benefits.
Davos Man viewed national boundaries as obsolete requiring further breaking down, despite growing scepticism of the benefits to the broader population.
A recent, leftist update on the perils of globalist billionaires was Davos Man, written by Peter Goodman of The New York Times in 2022. But these writers (Gray, Stiglitz and Goodman) are progressive outliers. The broad contemporary left is not only on board with Big Global, but is now part of the ruling, supra-national regime, in an unholy unity ticket with the establishment/corporate right.
However, it is another book, not directly about libertarianism, that has gained my attention recently. It is about technocracy and the new world order, written by Patrick M Wood (Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order, 2018). Wood is one of the world’s experts on the subject and focuses on groups like the Trilateral Commission and their peers in the World Economic Forum and the Bilderberg Group. Wood has spelled out his theories in detail, and eloquently, on The Delingpod.
Monopolist aspirations and behaviour of the kind signalled by Thiel aren’t the biggest problems for neoliberalism, however, repugnant though they now are. The problem lies in what occurred in the name of libertarianism back in the 80s. It turns out the anti-globalisation lefties were right, even if they didn’t then know why they were right.
The neoliberal project ostensibly aimed to free individuals – though, in practice, it turned out to be primarily about freeing businesses – from the clutches of the ever-creeping and controlling state. The nation state, to be accurate. The twin strategic actions undertaken to achieve this were deregulation and privatisation, with the add-on of engineered meritocracy. The outcomes of these aspirations and then the associated policies were globalism – the deregulation of borders – and managerialist technocracy. Rule by unelected and, increasingly, offshore, experts. Deregulation and privatisation, in effect, provided the essential pre-conditions for globalism. They freed corporates to colonise the globe without the nationally driven constraints formerly delivered through regulatory frameworks and the state management of core services and infrastructure. In a couple of decades, an unshackled private sector has become what CJ Hopkins has called “globocap”.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/the-push-toward-a-new-totalitarian-normal-c-j-hopkins
Oh, and by the way, government has just gotten bigger, anyway. And far more intrusive. And fiscally incontinent. And the corporates have gone intrusively woke, and, of course, green, with their new reach. We have the worst of every world, and global governance to boot. Now we are ruled by stakeholder capitalism, or stakeholder fascism as some have (quite accurately) termed it. With principles of ESG and DEI firmly embedded therein. Turbo-charged corporates with massive resources, global reach and vast interconnections with all of the other twenty-first century ideological titans – the education blob, the legacy media, the omnipresent NGOs, the woke bureaucrats.
The main outcome of all this – the destruction of personal freedoms – is beyond ironic. And we didn’t so much lose the “state” as lose the “nation”. The globalist technocrats have achieved every damned thing they wanted, now enshrined (just this week past) with the United Nations’ so-called Pact for the Future.
https://www.un.org/en/summit-of-the-future/pact-for-the-future
The neoliberals have turned out to have been merely useful idiots for the real players, who had altogether other ends in mind than enhanced freedom for everyman. (Sadly, I cannot exclude myself from the 80s class of useful idiots).
Here are some of the core elements of the emerging new world order, as Patrick Wood has described them:
· Smart cities;
· The dominance of the economy by fintech;
· Ubiquitous and cashed-up pension and private equity funds;
· Social engineering by corporates;
· AI;
· Global cities; and
· Public-private partnerships.
To these, I would add surveillance capitalism and super-sized, globally networked local councils.
These may seem to constitute a strange mix. Not when you dig deeper. You will find that each of these outcomes had its origin in one or other of the 1980s foundational, neoliberal building blocks. Especially deregulation and the other core tools of globalisation, like floating exchange rates, rapid and rabid financialisation, “independent” central banks, easy money, frictionless borders, increased immigration, free trade, the cutting of tariffs and other forms of industry protection, and the rest.
What we now have is more Brave New World than Atlas Shrugged. And the culprit has been, mostly, neoliberalism, with a twist of globalist-enabling technology. They are the fruits of naïve 1980s policies. Yet more evidence of the evils of the law of unintended consequences. Neither Thatcher nor Reagan, nor their muses, Hayek and Friedman, saw what might be coming. They would now all be, I hope, horrified. What their offspring have gifted us all is far less freedom, not more. Far more (global) state control, not less.
Of course, the globalists and the progenitors of technocracy existed well before the 1980s neoliberal generation came to power. The formers’ plans were hatched as far back as the 1930s, even earlier. Woodrow Wilson and the progressivists wanted a new world order and the death of the nation state. Well, they have it now. Richard Gardner, a member of yet another globalist outfit, the Rockefeller- and Kissinger-driven Council on Foreign Relations, described the goal in an epic piece in Foreign Affairs in 1974 as “an end-run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece”.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/hard-road-world-order
What they didn’t see coming was the role that free market thinkers and politicians would play in facilitating the transition.
It is a pity that Margaret Thatcher, in particular, didn’t take more notice back then of the late Sir Roger Scruton, who was never particularly a fan of all of the 80s capitalist hype nor of the policies into which that hype breathed life. It was because Thatcher and Reagan were such compelling political leaders, and because they gave such grief to our then political foes, that we wrongly invested such belief in all that they said and did. We, and they, liked all that freedom talk. But we didn’t have our thinking caps on.
The new, unexpected and strange, ideological hybrid of social liberalism and untrammelled corporate wealth and power is the bastard child of a failed 1980s marriage of post-modernist and neo-Marxist thinking, libertine, godless morals and unfettered free market economics. Among other things, this marriage has delivered the modern Tory Party, with all its confusions and missteps, and thoroughly alienated from its base.
For all these reasons, I won’t be voting for the Libertarian Party any time soon.
Paul Collits
27 September 2024
The problem is not with libertarianism, but au contraire that despite Thatcher and Reagan government has grown bigger and more powerful- and I would not describe either has having effected a libertarian revolution although they may have reversed or arrested the the socialist trend. But big government and the welfare state remained in tact much as before. In GB of course Blair took over and the rest is history- government became more powerful, run by technocrats and individual liberties were eroded.
Rather than being taken down a libertarian road the west has become infected with a strange mix of Marxism, globalism and crony capitalism.
The state has become more powerful butressed by technology and ultra nationalist organizations have dominated such the EU, the WHO, the UN etc;.
Washington has become an all powerful tyranny backed by the intel agencies, Big Tech, Big Pharma and the military industrial complex.
The Bushes and the neo cons were the antithesis off Reagan and Thatcher.
The war on terror led by Bush and the neo- cons has led to an overly powerful administrative state which has spread its tentacles and influence throughout the west.
The government and its surveillance arms, the NGOs, the supra national organizations, the Big Monopolies all work in cahoots creating a massively powerful surveillance control system. It is not clear who is in control - maybe they all have a hand on different parts of the control system sharing the control, wealth and power.
In summary the current situation cannot be blamed on libertarianism but the opposite - Marxism, crony capitalism, corporatism, globalism and the rise of the technocratic surveillance state- all of which are the antithesis of libertarianism. I will definitely vote for the Libertarian Party- what is the alternative - tweedle dee and tweele dum?
I generally agree with Paul but not on this matter. I think he should read a bit more of Jeffery Tucker and the Brownstone Institute and tune into the Liberty Report with Ron Paul!