The relationship between libertarianism and the alt-right has become a controversial issue in recent years. Views on the issue run the gamut from complete opposition to imperative alliance, with nearly every conceivable position between being advocated by someone noteworthy. Let us thoroughly explore the issue to see what support, if any, libertarians should provide to ethnic nationalist movements.

Ethnic Nationalism and Ethno-statism

Many people who support ethnic nationalism are also ethno-statists. That is, they seek to form nation-states that are ethnically homogeneous or nearly so, and they want these states to advance the interests of the majority population in an explicitly racial sense. While many ethnic nationalists advocate voluntary separation, it is unlikely that enough people would do this on a large enough scale to form the desired ethnic separation on the scale of contemporary nation-states. It would thus be necessary to initiate the use of force in order to achieve this goal, and this is nearly certain to occur regardless of whether leaders of ethno-state movements wish it to occur.

Libertarianism is a philosophical position on what constitutes the acceptable use of force. It says that initiating the use of force is never moral, but responding to an initiation of force with defensive force is always moral. This puts libertarians directly at odds with those who would use state power to force people into different associations from those which they would choose. In fact, libertarian philosophy justifies the use of any amount of force to defend against ethno-statists who attempt to forcibly separate people.

At first glance, this may appear to be an open-and-shut case, but there is far more nuance to consider. Unfortunately, most libertarian commentators stop here, failing to consider anarchic forms of ethnic nationalism as well as the role that ethno-statists may play in moving toward a free society, however unwittingly. Let us examine these and other considerations.

Anarcho-ethno-nationalism

The starting point for libertarian ethics is self-ownership; that each person has a right of exclusive control over one’s physical body and full responsibility for actions committed with said control. Note that in order to argue against self-ownership, one must exercise exclusive control of one’s physical body for the purpose of communication. This results in a performative contradiction because the content of the argument is at odds with the act of making the argument. By the laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction, self-ownership must be true because it must be either true or false, and any argument that self-ownership is false leads to a contradiction.

Each person has a right to exclusive control of one’s physical body, so it is wrong for one person to initiate interference with another person’s exclusive control of their physical body without their consent. This is how the non-aggression principle is derived from self-ownership. Each person has full responsibility for the actions that one commits with one’s physical body, so one may gain property rights in external objects by laboring upon unowned natural resources, and one owes restitution for any acts of aggression that one commits against other people or their property. The reason for this is that one is responsible for the improvements that one has made upon the natural resources, and it is impossible to own the improvements without owning the resources themselves. To initiate interference with another person’s property without their consent also violates the non-aggression principle because it denies them the just fruits of their labors.

It is possible to form and maintain an ethnic community using these principles. Someone may acquire land and form a community upon it, granting admission only to those who meet criteria chosen by the property owner. Alternatively, a group of like-minded people may purchase adjacent properties to achieve the same result. As long as no acts of aggression are committed, people who form a covenant community may choose whatever rules for admission and continued membership that they wish. As Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains,

“With respect to some pieces of land, the property title may be unrestricted; that is, the owner is permitted to do with his property whatever he pleases as long as he does not physically damage the property owned by others. With respect to other territories, the property title may be more or less severely restricted. As is currently the case in some housing developments, the owner may be bound by contractual limitations on what he can do with his property (voluntary zoning), which might include residential versus commercial use, no buildings more than four stories high, no sale or rent to Jews, Germans, Catholics, homosexuals, Haitians, families with or without children, or smokers, for example.”[1]

As Hoppe notes, these criteria may have a racial component, as a free society has no state to tell property owners that they may not discriminate on certain grounds that policymakers deem objectionable.

It would not do to leave unaddressed the apparent contradiction in anarcho-nationalism. This is a semantic problem; the word ‘nation’ has become convoluted in its meaning. In this case, nation is to be understood in the sense of the Old English word ‘thede.’ A thede is a group of people who share a heritage, whether this be cultural, genetic, linguistic, religious, or some combination thereof. They define an identity for themselves and consider themselves to be a group of which everyone else is not part. (The term ‘elthedish’ refers to those outside the thede.) A person may be part of multiple thedes or none at all, though the latter makes survival and reproduction much more difficult. Non-genetic thedes can and do exist, but as purely social constructs without a clear biological root, they are less stable and require effort to maintain. With this in mind, it becomes clear that anarcho-nationalism need not refer to the contradictory idea of a stateless state, but to the idea of a group of people with a shared identity and common heritage who reject statism in favor of voluntary forms of social order.

A Liberal Case for Illiberalism

Of course, at this point we may expect outrage from all of the usual suspects that one would lift a finger in defense of racists. The classical liberals among these people would do well to consider their own attitudes toward freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other such freedoms that they hold to be universal human rights. When they defend these ideas, they frequently find themselves standing up for people who make controversial and/or reprehensible statements. This occurs because censors pursue such people almost exclusively. After all, they have no motivation to target people who make ordinary conversation that has no potential to cause meaningful change. Classical liberals defend their ideological opponents from censorship because they believe that there is a short and slippery slope between infringement of the rights of some and infringement of the rights of most. Thus, they follow the quote commonly misattributed to Voltaire but actually written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, “I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it.“[2]

What they fail to realize is that the same is even more true of private property rights. In the libertarian view, freedom of communication is not a universal right. As Hoppe explains,

“In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. …Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal.”[3]

More generally, one has no right to communicate ideas on private property that someone else owns if doing so goes against the wishes of the property owner. Because private property is a more fundamental right than freedom of communication, restrictions on property rights are even more injurious to liberty than assaults upon freedom of speech or freedom of the press. As before, those who use their property in a mundane manner that is unlikely to cause meaningful change are unlikely to encounter interference. Those who are confronted about their non-aggressive use of private property rights will be those who use their property rights in a controversial and/or reprehensible manner, such as excluding people on the basis of race. Because there is a short and slippery slope from interference with politically incorrect uses of private property to all manner of interference with private property rights, those who use their property rights in a controversial and/or reprehensible manner (as long as no force is initiated in the process) should be the first people that libertarians (or classical liberals) defend.

Ethnic Separatism

As explained previously, libertarianism stands against an ethno-statist takeover of an existing state apparatus followed by ethnic cleansing, endorsing the use of force to defend against and stop such events from taking place. But ethno-statism need not manifest in this form. Another possibility is the concentration of people of the same ethnicity in a particular area, who then decide to secede that region from a larger state. Although ethno-statism cannot be supported by libertarians in an absolute sense because it is still a form of statism, there are several beneficial effects which may result from a race-based secessionist effort. This may allow libertarians to offer limited support for such a movement as a lesser evil than the current state of affairs with a possibility for greater potential for libertarian efforts in future.

First, let us consider the political orientation of the typical racial separatist. Overt and elevated in-group preference combined with statism results in an affinity for socialism, which tends to manifest as fascism or national socialism among white nationalists and as communism among racial nationalists of other races. If such people become concentrated in a certain area, it follows that the political climate in said area will become more socialist while the political climate elsewhere will become less socialist.

Second, it follows that ethno-statists are useful for breaking up large, powerful states into smaller, less threatening parts. If, for example, white nationalists were successful in seceding Oregon from the United States, and black nationalists were to do the same with Mississippi, then the United States government would be weaker than it is currently, and the two ethno-states would be weaker still. While there would still be much to be desired from a libertarian perspective, it would be an improvement over current levels of state power.

Third, the departure of the most bigoted and hateful individuals of all races into ethnically homogeneous territories would produce a significant reduction in racial tensions. After all, a multiracial society is more likely to succeed if those who deem it impossible remove themselves from that society, and an ethnically homogeneous society is the only way to satisfy such people. That such a scenario would distinguish the true separatists from race-baiting charlatans so as to expose the latter is a decided plus.

Next, let us consider the possible fallout from such a development. Secessionist movements, irrespective of their impetus, tend to inspire a nationalist response in other parts of a state. While this is fraught with its own dangers because nationalism is hostile to decentralization of power below the national level, nationalism is certainly a lesser evil than globalism, and may serve as a temporary makeshift on the path to a better political arrangement than that presaged by the United Nations and the European Union. If secessionists succeed in their efforts, it will inspire other secessionists to try their hand, some of whom may be far more libertarian than the ethno-statists who began the trend.

Just as altering the concentrations of racists and socialists are two-way streets, so is altering the concentration of libertarians. If people who reject libertarianism in favor of ethno-statism wish to concentrate somewhere and separate from the rest of a current state, this is beneficial for the cause of liberty in the remaining area because it raises the percentage of libertarians there. This could be a deciding factor in achieving the critical mass of libertarians necessary to form a libertarian social order.

Crossover Effects

It is necessary to explore the consequences for the libertarian movement from explicitly standing up for the rights of ethnic nationalists. Because any collaborative interaction between groups is likely to result in some degree of personnel exchange, we may expect that some ethnic nationalists would become libertarians and vice versa. If ethnic nationalists would embrace libertarianism, that means that they would accept self-ownership, the non-aggression principle, and private property rights. As a result, they would have to stop initiating the use of force in their advancement of racism and advocating for politicians to do so on their behalf. This should be regarded as a positive development by any sane person. The presence of such people would also help to counter the worrying development of entryism by social justice warriors and other leftists into libertarian circles by triggering them into leaving.

We may also expect that some libertarians will become ethnic nationalists. They are more likely to become the sort of anarcho-thedists discussed earlier than to ally with national socialists, though the latter is not unheard of. This may be a positive development, in that there is a tendency toward politically autistic hyper-individualism in the contemporary libertarian movement. This is an individualism so extreme that it fails to comprehend group identities or interests, and may even deny their existence and relevance. Mingling with ethnic nationalists may awaken libertarians to the realities of demographic issues and alert them to the fact that they will consistently lose to those who organize around a group identity unless they do so themselves.

The Nature of the West

The final matter to consider is the role of ethnicity in libertarianism itself. Anyone who has been to a libertarian gathering knows that the attendees at any such event will skew overwhelmingly white, and anyone who has studied libertarian philosophy will know that most of its authors are white and/or Jewish. Ethnic nationalists have an explanation for this that fits with the available logic and evidence. Like any other species, humans adapt to their environment. Although humans are uniquely capable of adapting the environment to themselves, differences between individuals frequently outweigh differences between groups, and there has been significant mixing of human populations, these do not completely negate the former effect. Humans in different parts of the world have also developed different cultural norms, governing philosophies, and religious traditions as adaptations to their particular environments. This explains why universally preferable values are not universally preferred and why there is a correlation between ethnicity and the acceptance of libertarian ethical norms. Those who view the West only as a portable set of ideas should consider the above explanation for why the portability of those ideas has been relatively poor and why the continued practice of them outside of the West is linked to a legacy of Western colonialism in such places.

At this point, a few caveats are necessary. None of this is to say that individuals of color cannot become libertarians, or that the failure of non-Western cultures to produce a tradition of libertarian philosophy thus far proves that they cannot. Nor should libertarians who are not of European or Jewish descent be anything less than welcome in libertarian groups. But in the aggregate, demographic disparities are natural and should be expected. The disproportionate number of white or white-passing people at libertarian gatherings is neither a problem to be solved nor an achievement to be celebrated; it is simply a result explained by evolution and history. Thus, there is cause for cautious optimism that some white nationalists may come to reject statism and socialism in favor of creating a libertarian social order in their ethnic communities.

Conclusion

Depending on circumstances, libertarians can support some forms of ethnic nationalism, as long as they only involve voluntary ethnic separation and seek to use private property rights to create their ethnic enclaves. However, libertarians should forcibly suppress those who insist on aggressive violence in pursuit of racial agendas. Regardless of whether they agree with such action, libertarians should defend the rights of anarcho-ethno-nationalists to do this, as it is both a litmus test for true belief in private property and the first target that enemies of libertarianism will attack in a larger quest to diminish or destroy private property rights. This is an actual slippery slope that must be vigorously guarded.

No libertarian can support statism or involuntary socialism in an absolute sense, but the kind of self-quarantine of such ideologies that ethno-statists propose may prove useful for libertarians who do not live in an ethno-state. If ethnic nationalism leads people to break apart larger states into smaller ones, this would be a positive step toward liberty. A more general sense of nationalism may develop in response to ethnic secessionist movements, and while this will present an obstacle to further localization in the long-term, it may be a useful temporary ally against statist globalism.

The West, and the liberty that has thus far uniquely developed from its traditions, is neither exclusively genetic nor exclusively ideological; it is partly both. Libertarian philosophy was mostly constructed by members of particular thedes, and other members of those thedes are statistically more likely to accept this philosophy. Ethnic nationalists can inform and remind libertarians of this so that efficiency may be increased by focusing more on the aforementioned thedes in our conversion efforts.

References:

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann (2001). Democracy: The God That Failed. Transaction Publishers. p. 139. S. G. Tallentyre (Actual author: Evelyn Beatrice Hall) (1906). The Friends of Voltaire. Published by John Murray, Albemarle Street, London. p. 198-9. Hoppe, p.218.

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