By Kbolino

SLD: NAXALT. If you haven’t seen it before, this is an acronym that stands for “Not All X Are Like That” and is used, in various circles, to qualify a general statement about the behavior of groups of people by the admission that there are counterexamples but they aren’t the examples being discussed. Case-in-point, “Not All Libertarians Are Like That” applies to the following analysis.

The first and most important question in discussing this topic among a bunch of libertarians is to define “alt-right”. Unfortunately, that’s surprisingly difficult to do. For some, it’s the label applied to any of their enemies. For others, it’s the label used to salami-slice the right side of the political spectrum into smaller and more easily crushed pieces. Few people, and basically none today, self-identify with the label. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to crib Michael Malice’s definition of the “New Right” which is more precise and more useful anyway:

A loosely connected group of individuals united by their opposition to progressivism, which they perceive to be a thinly veiled fundamentalist religion dedicated to egalitarian principles and intent on totalitarian world domination via globalist hegemony.

How does a bunch of libertarians end up under that banner? I mean, sure, there’ve always been conspiracy theorists and other cranks among our number, but now they’re converging on this particular set of beliefs? Well, let’s trace out the path.

The first thing to observe is that libertarians are noticers. They’re misfits who notice the things that ordinary people are not supposed to notice. Things like: the government is incompetent and wasteful; public school funding has tripled while outcomes haven’t changed; you need a million licenses and other permission slips to do anything remunerative legally in many jurisdictions; the “housing crisis” is largely a result of intentional policy; a combination of labor union intransigence and environmental regulation drove the decline of American industry; etc.

The naïve libertarian conclusion here is that all of these factors are centered around one institution, the government, and that the government must be “the problem”. This is a first-order kind of noticing. And, ceteris paribus, in context, it’s not wrong. Injecting this government and these people into any situation they aren’t already involved with will only make things worse. There’s no denying that. The problem starts to arise when the proposed solution, to reduce the power of government, can never quite materialize. Libertarians inherit from the liberal tradition, and that tradition views the state as a unique institution which is separate from the rest of society, at least in theory.

Some people noticing things from a different angle came up with “public-choice theory”. This places government agents as economic and political actors. It is not enough to merely win an election; any interaction between voters, representatives, and government agents must be viewed as a multipolar negotiation, not a simple and unidirectional flow of demands. Already we’ve dispensed with the veil that the government is merely an engine for enacting voters’ preferred policy. I’d call this a second-level noticing. We’ve gone a bit deeper.

It is not a coincidence that there’s significant overlap between libertarians and public-choicers. These two groups share a common thread of misfittery that doesn’t befall the general public. Where Joe Q. Public sees “this isn’t working”, the misfit asks “but why?” Now though we start to enter the truly dangerous territory. Public-choicers were tolerable misfits. The “alt-right” isn’t.

If naïve libertarians have identified merely symptoms and indicators, then public-choicers have progressed to identifying proximate causes. But what of root causes? What sits at the heart of this beast, directing its desires? This is where yet another group of people notice even harder. We have now reached Mencius Moldbug and his blog Unqualified Reservations. These ideas are those of “neoreaction”, a name evocative of reactionary politics (more Franco or Pinochet than the Austrian Painter) that’s combined with a sense that something new is going on. After all, the old reactionaries were fighting communists. While some government agents might fly the hammer and sickle, most don’t.

If government agents can act of their own accord, outside of the demands of representatives, and representatives can act of their own accord, outside the demands of voters, then whence do they obtain their motivations to act? If somebody could influence what representatives and government agents think and want, would they not be at least as powerful as the voters? Finding out these answers gives us the next link in the causal chain. Perhaps even allows us to glimpse the root cause, insofar as it even exists. This is the natural next step for misfits who can’t stop noticing things. And this is where neoreaction attempts to provide an answer.

I’m not even going to summarize neoreactionary thought, at least partly because I can’t do it justice in this form. I will provide a link to Unqualified Reservations and recommend “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives” which despite its title is approachable by any American born before the year 1995; sadly, anyone younger than that may find its examples too dated to relate to. Nevertheless, I think the explanation of why so many libertarians ended up there (or moved through there to other places) can be found from this primary source speaking for itself.

Tangentially, it’s worth noting that there are other paths down this pipeline. Some that come to mind are Hans-Herman Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed and the Austrian School of the late Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises. Those paths don’t all end at the same destination, for what it’s worth. Hoppeans and Moldbugites want monarchy; the Mises Caucus largely believes democracy is salvageable. Moldbug wants a strong government that maintains order and suppresses chaos; Hoppe wants a government that favors liberty and can be held strictly accountable when it doesn’t. These goals all seem widely divergent, but that’s why Malice called them “a loosely connected group of individuals” after all.

In conclusion, I think the simplest way to summarize the “Libertarian to Alt-Right Pipeline” is to say it functions among people who are inclined to dig into deeper explanations but can’t stop digging. Every time they find unsatisfactory or incomplete answers, they go deeper. Whether this work is ultimately productive or not remains to be seen. On the topic, I can also recommend this Twitter thread which lays out the pipeline from a somewhat different perspective.