The Crack-Up

April 4, 2023 10:45 AM

We often speak of secessionist and far-right movements such as the neo-Confederates in purely political or cultural terms, as symptoms of a sometimes pathologized fixation on ethnicity that crowds out all economic concerns. But this is wrong. from The Wonderful Death of a State by Quinn Slobodian
posted by chavenet (8 comments total)

Tommy Douglas, a Canadian politician, once said that "Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."
posted by mhoye at 11:20 AM on April 4, 2023 [48 favorites]

Chavenet, you always find the best things to post! And this one, wow. Slobodian's Globalists has been on my shelf waiting until I'm back to reading politics and economics, but I think I'm going to have to add Crack-Up Capitalists to the pile based on the strength of this excerpt! There are SO MANY BAD IDEAS being chronicled here! I don't think enough people who flirt with libertarianism understand the deep, deep links to racism inherent in the philosophy...but there's such a rich intellectual history (well, put 'intellectual' in quotes I guess) to be explored! (And the part where Richard Spencer appears! So dramatic!!!)
posted by mittens at 11:57 AM on April 4, 2023 [8 favorites]

This is at the edge of my comprehension level, and there's a lot of names and references I would have to research further, but this excerpt makes the book seem very interesting.

The main thing that gets me with this sort of mindset is how unnatural and divorced from reality it always seems to be. The vast majority of human beings are not without compassion. Treating someone of a different race than you differently is a *learned* behavior. It's not some innate thing. So the idea that the ideal form of un-government is little statelets of people just like you makes little sense to me. How do the margins and borders work? And more importantly, different kinds of people have the different kinds of talents and interests and abilities that make society work!

I think most of this stems from a perhaps unspoken idea that if there are more little statelets, that means there's more kings overall, and there's a greater chance they get to be king. These people never seem to have in mind that they are often relatively frail old men who would be put down in a fight by anyone moderately athletic. Who's the king now?
posted by jellywerker at 2:08 PM on April 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

In a world without central government, the shapes of new communities would be determined by “neighborhood-contracts” between property owners.

Tell me you want to be a warlord without saying you want to be a warlord.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 6:09 PM on April 4, 2023 [13 favorites]

The deviation of the New Left from his preferred script of racial exit turned Rothbard violently against it by the early 1970s. Their dogged egalitarianism was an affront to his belief in the biologically hardwired hierarchy of talent and ability in both individuals and groups.

That's a pretty long about way to say, "his racist beliefs."
posted by AlSweigart at 8:21 PM on April 4, 2023 [8 favorites]

The vast majority of human beings are not without compassion. Treating someone of a different race than you differently is a *learned* behavior. It's not some innate thing.

Oooh, I just had a thought. Maybe its not inherent to any particular person, but maybe the concept of in-groups and out-groups is inherent to society. And social justice is expanding the circle of in-groups until the only out-groups are those that think there should be out-groups (i.e. racists).
posted by LizBoBiz at 8:03 AM on April 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

Tell me you want to be a warlord without saying you want to be a warlord.

Yeah. The writer elides by it (of course! pointing that out would be biased!!!), but every person mentioned either came from an extremely wealthy family or is currently extremely wealthy, so they all expect to be kings of their own kingdom.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:06 AM on April 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

I skimmed the dense article, but there's a whole lot of racist people mentioned in something that seems to be trying to argue the problem isn't just racism
posted by Jacen at 10:57 AM on April 5, 2023 [3 favorites]