Tactical Libertarianism and the Porn Question

Measured by organic support, libertarian philosophy appeals to almost no one. It nevertheless exerts an outsized influence in politics because it is a useful weapon for a hypocritical ruling class, that wields it selectively and in bad faith.

Whenever someone questions the tech companies’ right to censor right-wing opinions, for instance, liberals suddenly turn into Murray Rothbard, proclaiming that a private company can do whatever it wants with its own property. It does not bother these people that this same argument was sharpened most effectively through white resistance to the Civil Rights Act, in defense of business owners’ right to exclude blacks from their property. Unlike libertarian autists, the liberals who invoke these principles don’t really believe them, and feel no need to apply them consistently. They are simply weapons to use against their enemies, free to be discarded whenever new weapons may be found that work better. And of course, libertarian arguments that would seriously challenge the ruling class—not only in opposition to the Civil Rights Act but even on more innocuous issues like constitutionalism, states’ rights, a peaceful foreign policy, or an end to business subsidies— do not get the same treatment. They are totally ignored, ridiculed, and driven into conservative ghettos like Breitbart.

The now-familiar dialectic of “tactical libertarianism” has reemerged once again in the debate over banning porn, which rages on right-wing Twitter. In any healthy society, there should really be no debate that the type of hardcore pornography found online should be banned. Everyone knows it is disgusting; none but the most deranged leftists and cumbrains try to defend it as valuable in itself.  (Who after all, could seriously defend the merits of a film showing close up anal penetration, or 15 furries masturbating?). Everyone knows also that it is addictive, that it drives an alienating wedge between the sexes, creating false expectations on the nature of sex and incentivizing young men to spend their most virile years masturbating at home instead of interacting with women on healthy terms in the real world. Its long-term effects can be summarized from the fact that, even as all aspects of society have been entirely sexualized, more and more men in their twenties are suffering erectile dysfunction. Lastly, the pornography industry is notoriously cruel and exploitative to its own workers, even to the point of child sex trafficking,

The libertarian’s role is to effectively frustrate the normal human desire to ban such an awful thing, by reframing the debate to a narrow argument over procedure. Any time that someone proposes against this clear moral and public-health menace…in swoops the libertarian, to somberly inform us that doing so is simply impossible. That would be tyranny and violate our most cherished values, don’t you see?

Often, this is accompanied by a pseudo-masculine posturing. If you want government action, the libertarian adult-in-the-room[1] tells us, that’s really just a sign of your inadequacy, that you can’t control your own urges or protect your own children without help from Big Daddy Government.

Of course, there is nothing masculine about letting the world degrade around you just because you think that you personally can survive it. The purpose of life should not be to set up a series of hurdles that only the strongest can pass. People are flawed and sometimes need help. If the government can shape the law to make their lives easier, then it should do so. Why let a bad system persist, just because the stronger citizens are able to overcome it?

All of this should be common sense. Indeed, it would be common sense for most of American history. It is libertarianism, by contrast—with its demands for total government inaction as a categorical imperative—that is the outlier and demands some explanation. Does anyone seriously believe that societies are duty-bound to watch themselves decay, just because of some abstract idea of liberty?

The answer, of course, is no, they don’t. Outside a few ideological cliques, no one really believes in libertarianism. The people most loudly defending porn online today—people like the gay twenty-year-old atheist “conservative” Brad Polumbo—should be considered less as offering political “opinions” and more as the mouthpieces of a rich and well-connected ruling class, which benefits financially from the porn industry and—more indirectly—from the general sexualization of culture, with its corresponding atomization. If Polumbo lost his job as a conservative mouthpiece, his donors would easily find another college student to ply with money, adopt their positions, and play the same role. These positions do not need to be rigorous or even intellectually defensible. They just have to lay out the party line that conservatives, libertarians, and others on the right are required to take.

 Whether Polumbo actually believes this line of reasoning is also inconsequential. His handlers—for whom porn is a lucrative business and a great way to keep young men distracted and pacified—certainly don’t believe it. The whole show is a big put-on in the hopes that you, white man, will be stupid enough to believe it, and that through a decontextualized focus on rules, fair play, and procedure, you will come to believe that, dang it all, it turns out we just can’t address important social problems after all. What is most galling about this whole charade is the enforced passivity. It is built around the fundamental lie that we are not really the masters of our destiny, and that we must be chained to outmoded rules, even at the expense of a diminished quality of life, out of some kind of principles.

Ideological principles should serve people; people were not made to serve ideology. If your ideology no longer addresses the important issues, then you should reject it. The State can be whatever we want it to be. Yes, that means we can use it crush bad things and promote good things. Libertarianism is useful to the ruling class because it tells the masses that we have to accept the situation we have now, and can never use hard power to make it better.

That line of thought only becomes powerful if we let it. The true right should just ignore libertarians or treat them with contempt, and then go about fulfilling our obligations to society. We have nothing to lose but our chains!

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[1] While not known for their sense of humor, the libertarian attempt to play the adult is genuinely hilarious. Murray Rothbard once suggested that, while zoning laws are ipso facto a violation of libertarian principle, a homeowner need not worry because he could achieve the same result if he bought all his neighbors’ homes! (See here, at page 18.) Or consider Michael Malice’s claim that  that drug addicts “in fact make highly rational decisions though ones geared toward a very short timeframe.” It is also libertarian dogma that blackmail should be legal, and that public roads and the U.S. Post Office represent the gravest tyranny. But when it comes to defending child sexual exploitation, these same people suddenly morph into serious adults…who take the very adult pro-exploitation side.

-By Aidan Castile