Thread by @hamandcheese

Ancaps became white nationalists because they realized the institutions that would form spontaneously in a stateless society would mirror racially separated prison gangs.

Murray Rothbard, for ex, supported both the Black Panthers and neo-Confederates for accelerationist reasons.

Rothbard saw how the collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to previously suppressed nationalisms, and reasoned that a similar collapse of the US government would produce decentralized "nations of consent," a feasible 2nd best to total privatization.
mises.org/library/nation…

If your primary enemy is the state, you end up making peace with the (ethno)nations that replace it.

This distinguishes ancaps from the liberal social contract tradition, which associates liberty to the modern state as a tool to transcend rule by clan.
niskanencenter.org/explaining-whi…

Some examples of great scholarship on this subject include Mark Weiner's "The Rule of the Clan," and "Persecution and Toleration" by @ndjohnson and @MarkKoyama
liberalcurrents.com/liberalism-and…

This frames why I find current trends so troubling. US institutions are unusually fragile, while the liberal core of American elite ideology is being succeeded by something new based in racial consciousness. Whatever its merits, it is feeding into the accelerationists' playbook.

This isn't to draw any kind of moral equivalence. But remember, Rothbard wasn't motivated by white nationalism per se. Rather, he saw ethnically laden right-wing populism as a means to an end, foreseeing a counter-reaction that would accelerate the legitimacy crisis doom loop.

This is happening in the background of a pandemic, 20% unemployment, America's decline as a superpower, partial deglobalization, a secular Great Awakening, and a digital media revolution with seismic repercussions on the perceptions of both political and corporate authorities.

Social order is fragile in the best of times. Any large system of coordination relies overwhelmingly on voluntary compliance and internalized norms. There aren't enough police, courts, inspectors, or IRS auditors in the world to maintain order through threat of sanction alone.

This is what makes the "thin blue line" both real and over-rated. The existence of sanctions and a rule enforcer is a necessary condition for social order, but in a functional society visible enforcement fades into the background of normatively regulated behavior.

The strategy Rothbard identified with "reformist" libertarianism is advocacy against bad laws from within the system.

The right-populist strategy, in contrast, was about leveraging ethnocultural grievances to undermine the *normative authority of the state and law itself.*

Nature abhors a vacuum. When a government loses normative authority the public doesn't become made up of "political atheists". Rather they reach to other sources of authority, including racial and religious heritage.

Today, political authority is being depleted on all sides.

In that sense, thinking you don't need to wear a mask because you follow God's law, or don't have to pay income taxes because the Sixteenth Amendment wasn't properly ratified, is not dissimilar to thinking mass vandalism is OK because white supremacists founded America in 1619.

Large factions of both the left and right are gravitating toward worldviews that provide dueling, extralegal sources of normative authority. This has leapfrogged purposeful civil disobedience, and into an arms race of moral licensing, including of outright anti-social behavior.

Where Rothbard's theory went awry is his vision of the endgame. USSR-like state collapse is highly unlikely in US, notwithstanding insolvent local governments and civil unrest. Instead, warring subnations just entrench the status quo but with ever greater distrust and dysfunction

As subgroups cease to recognize and internalize the validity of political authorities, normative self-regulation gives way to either anomie or a reliance on overt sanction. Either way, all sides will feel will as if society has become far more arbitrary and punitive to their own.