Thoughts on Roderick Long's "They saw It Coming."
But Long also repeats the traditional libertarian equation of democracies with states in a way that helps to obscure the contemporary relevance of this critique. Even so, he also opens the door, perhaps uninteltionally, to another perspective. Quite correctly in my view, he writes that the logic of organized domination explains why states treat independent organizations as either “potential rivals” to be abolished (communism) or “potential ALLIES of the state . . . here lies the fascist strategy.” States, like corporations, most unions, and the Catholic Church can be best understood as hierarchies of power and subordination - but with greater ability to use violence to enforce their leaders' will.
I want to suggest a somewhat different framework than Long's to make sense of what these classic thinkers observed.
1. The logic of the market does in fact lead to the rise of enormous enterprises and concentrations of wealth that are threatened by the same open competitive forces that produced them. This fact has been mostly underappreciated in contemporary classical liberal thought because it has been largely dominated by economic perspectives - perspectives necessary to understanding why socialism is a hopeless vision but inadequate to grasping what constitutes a free society. The victory of free markets analysis has led to an equation of a free society with the free market alone.
2. These large enterprises will frequently utilize government to secure and strengthen their position by both handicapping potential rivals, as described in Long's article, and in opening up new areas for their domination through manipulation of property rights (as we see today with intellectual property rights).
3. Along with competition within the market order, the chief checks to their strength will be social institutions and forces which themselves are neither purely market not purely government in nature. They are usually considered to be part of civil society - that part of society where voluntary cooperation occurs around values more complex than simply making money.
4. Civil society has two avenues for seeking to influence society as a whole: voluntary relations outside government and democracy. Here I want to elaborate a bit.
Probably 90% of my readers equate democracy with the state. But the state is a hierarchy of domination and a democracy is not. My book Persuasion, Power and Polity (2000) showed why a majoritarian model of democracy made no sense empirically or logically, whereas consensual models did. Once we clear away the confusions over terminology promulgated by right and left alike, Madison is the main thinker of consensual democratic theory. Democracy in Madison's sense is a spontaneous order as Hayek defined the term: an order arising from abstract procedural rules applying equally to all and relying on agreement to function.
Democracies are procedures whereby people within a society seek to make basic value choices for society as a whole that either need to be made on that scale, or that many believe would be made better of made on that scale. As such, a democracy is akin to a community cooperative - as I developed in some detail in PPP.
Like corporations in the market order, the executive branch and congress are rooted within the democratic process, come to power within it, and then often seek to subordinate it to the perpetuation of their own power and wealth. The situations are exactly analogous. In fact, I suggest that it is a waste of time to argue whether big business or politicians are to blame. Both are. They are generally symbiotes.
Recent events, as well as past wars, illustrate that Randolph Bourne was right in saying war is the health of the state - and conversely, war is a serious illness in a democracy. War is perhaps occasionally necessary for self-defense, but always creates a situation where government can try and subordinate democratic procedures to the dictates of rule and domination. This is why the ideological treason of so many classical liberals over George Bush and the Republican Right is so very serious. They gave enormous aid and comfort to the enemy. Permanent war is the death of democracy for it turns a free society into an organization.
Another way to put this general point: markets subordinate economic organizations to powers and processes they do not control. Democracy subordinates political organizations to powers and processes they do not control. Both are forced to be responsive - at the risk of losing their positions. So both are hostile to these processes and seek to insulate themselves from threat.
5. As spontaneous orders democracies and markets are oriented towards different values, but both are important and necessarily exist in tension with one another because we as human beings hold to both broad sets of values and they are in some tension in our own minds: concern with our selves as discrete individuals and concern with ourselves as members of communities.
One causualty of economistic classical liberalism is to obscure the distinction between private interest groups and public interest groups. The difference is vital - especially with respect to the issue of facsism. Private need not mean bad, public need nbot mean good. The terms refer to the kinds of values pursued: monetary or nonmonetary.
6. The alliance of classical liberals with economistic interpretations of society has not only pulled the teeth of their critique of power as it really manifests, it has set them at odds with important elements of civil society that are seeking to limit the power and privilege of the corporate/political oligarchy. While a book could be written filled with examples of this, I will stick to just one. Libertarians on balance have an irrational hatred of environmentalists. Reason magazine is an excellent example.
Yet consider the following: Why do environmentalists seek to influence government so much? To explore just one instance: because government owns national forests and parks where many natural values still remain. Further, government has passed laws saying that you cannot bid on a forest cut if you do not intend in fact to cut the trees. Attempts at voluntary buying out of forest cuts and then not cutting are illegal. Yet the companies given special privileges to cut forests portray themselves as the paragons of capitalism and the environmentalists as advocates of the state - and nearly all libertarians say “right on!” Too many libertarians and classical liberals then support efforts by this privileged elite to eliminate legal avenues whereby environmentalists can appeal decisions giving the woods over to the timber companies - in the name of “deregulation.” Others suggest simply selling the forests to the corporations, which is not much better.
There are civil society institutions that could offer a way to remove forests from the not so tender mercies of Congress and the timber companies and still provide wood to society - but I have found that free market think tanks and libertarians are usually not interested. They want to privatize (i.e. corporatize) the forests. Small wonder so many non-libertarians think of them as lap dogs to the privileged. They are.
7. The result is that IN PRACTICE libertarian and classical liberal thinkers today are more often allies of fascism than effective opponents of it. Long's important piece offers a way to begin getting clear of this weakness.