You don’t have to be a Marxist, a radical libertarian anarchist like Hans-Hermann Hoppe or a believer in traditional conspiracy fairy tales to understand that Western democracies appear to be rigged against the populations, against fair economic playing fields and generally against freedom.
People who seriously despise how rigged everything is against freedom tend to become libertarians. Conservatives have a lot more tolerance for rigging if the rigging is, or at least appears, to their preferences.
Libertarianism is not a comprehensive science about attaining and maintaining liberty though. It pretends to be that, while it uses only a few mechanisms within theoretical models to try to explain and solve everything. Private property is hailed as the holy magic to ward off the demons. Yet the task is dimensions more complex. We are all prisoners in roughly the same high-tech, superpowered prison.
Classic libertarian authors still incorporated nation state republics with democratic elements in their theoretical models. Others simplified their models by deleting any statehood. From one my shelves I grabbed a German edition of “Democracy: The God That Failed“ by Hans-Hermann Hoppe with a foreword that may or may not be part of other editions.
He is mostly moving within his own theoretical model and mechanisms. Sporadically he mentions real-world issues in a superficial manner which serves to confirm his model. When you talk real-world issues with one of his followers they repeat his mechanisms or suddenly flip to the sphere of this theoretical utopia where everything works beautifully. Deviating from Hoppe is regarded as a slope so slippery they will not tolerate it unless the prophet himself insinuates some kind of weird compromise of the dogma, for example not helping Ukraine defend against the Russian empire which calls itself the 3rd Rome.
American democracy was a failure to Hoppe and according to him it is destined to fail like Soviet communism. He appears like a tiger when he trashes Western democracies and like a toothless old cat when he describes older aristocracies and their empires. With this double-standard he can schmooze up to the conservatives he wants to recruit for his movement. But if we follow this line we sabotage our ability to really understand how the democracies and the dominant corporations were formed, who formed them, who cultivated them and how key elements of empires were sustained. Again, one does not have to be a Marxist to examine this critically.
Empires have existed for roughly 10,000 years and they functioned more or less the same. Control and expansion by any means necessary. 90% (the serfs) had no meaningful assets and rights. A few percent had some privileges in exchange for the loyalty towards the leadership of roughly 1,5%. Even that tiny elite itself had a steep curve in terms of control and wealth. If you have seen the palaces in London or Paris, you understand not only the pathological greed of past times, but also the mystery cults reaching back into the ancient world. Punishments for rebels, which seem like the workings of demented sadistic serial killers, were public spectacles. If larger military campaigns produced a million deaths and gained a million slaves it was considered a glorious success. Any empire had to allocate its limited resources in the best possible way and this gave birth to mass espionage, foreign and domestic.
There are only three relevant democracies in history: The British, the French and the American. The British empire more or less faked its enlightenment from above, running more and more political and economic front organizations through basic intelligence techniques. King George I. was part of the Welf-Wettin-Reginar supercluster and under his rule Freemasonry was concocted as a tool and the scientific “Royal Society” became its sister organization. More controlled politicians and controlled capitalism and more freedoms for the population within tight and sometimes invisible guardrails was not “decay” as Hoppe would describe it but rather a massive step for the British Empire. It outperformed its French rival who was still stuck in old-school monarchy. In Britain the ruling class could claim the people had political representation. In France everybody was mad at the king. In Britain the ruling structures seemed ever more complicated and confusing for the population. The French people knew who ran the show. Tsarist Russia was a losing, backwards empire with hordes of angry peasants. The more “modern” Britain appeared, the more successful it became.
The probability that the crown had very good espionage networks in the American colonies is very high. George Washington and other rebels would have been detected early and easily. He didn’t have any significant military capabilities or funding for a rebellion. Instead of squashing him quickly and decisively the crown gave him space and some successes, which led France to sink vast sums into his campaign. This seriously damaged the French finances. Britain did not use multiple opportunities to end Washington which was so suspicious that British officers and officials started to suspect some high level treason.
Britain eventually stopped the physical war but continued the spy war indefinitely. The new USA was ruled by a tight group of families. Some really wanted a republic. Others wanted to be secretly part of the British empire and copy its mechanisms and institutions, from Freemasonry to intermarrying like aristocrats to elite cadre schools and secret societies.
When George W. Bush campaigned against John Kerry things were getting grotesque. Both were from the same exclusive Yale secret society “Skull &Bones”. Both came from old, established families. Some Bones-members had become wealthy in the China Opium trade. John Kerry’s mother was part of the Forbes family, a clan of elite “Boston Brahmins” who also traded opium.
The Order of Skull and Bones is a secret society founded at Yale by William Huntington Russell. His cousin Samuel Russell’s family enterprise was the largest American opium smuggler, working with the Scottish firm Jardine-Matheson. John Murray Forbes’s opium profits bankrolled the Bell Telephone Company. Dope smuggler Thomas Perkins founded America’s first commercial railroad. After Britain officially ended slavery, the US continued it and sold goods like slave cotton to British businesses.
Dirty empire money was reinvested in clean-looking enterprises and banks. A select network of families spent part of this money on expensive cadre schools. Mostly for their own offspring, but also for the occasional talents from the peasant class. If you got to join the system, you were at its mercy of course.
Britain had built an elaborate offshore system for corporations. The US copied this. Democracy meant the average people had the illusion of representation. The elite could fleece the population through state and private vehicles simultaneously: A government vehicle had the power to tax and regulate. A private vehicle enjoyed the right to avoid the prying eyes of the public. The elite had to maintain a certain façade. A behemoth like Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was dismantled on paper only.
The British Empire constructed its own socialist movement through elite “Fabians” and the Labour party. Key figures were member of the crown’s Privy Council. In essence, socialism is simply serfdom under another name. You don’t get to have significant assets or rights. You work for the system and that’s it.
France was reaching bankruptcy because the Monarchy hadn’t faked an enlightenment from the ground up. Sinking money into George Washington was a fiscal disaster. The French Revolution was followed by a chaotic back and forth between some kind of republic and classic empire. France is now in its 5th republic attempt and still fought its own Algerian colony from 1954 to 1962, characterized by mass death and torture.
Other democracies in various countries had to follow the Anglo superpower line after 1945.
So what democracy is Hoppe really talking about? Sure, the Habsburg line or the Hohenzollerns lost their empires. The Bourbons don’t have a French throne anymore. But the Welfs, Wettins and Reginars are vast and they bought into the modern developments. Democracy was not necessarily a decay of old structures. It was a clever ploy to make a system appear far more complicated than it is and it provides the illusion of participation. Elites could buy enough control over the typical ideological spheres, design them like cults and thus divide and conquer the populations. Political science and the study of history have refused to properly incorporate modern scientific findings about pathological evil and the vast dimension of espionage since the beginning of empires.
In his book Hoppe laments the “politically correct” American view on history, especially in the 20th century as a triumph of good over evil. He superficially brings up the Civil War, the American involvement in WWI, the relationship between Roosevelt and Stalin and even uses the term “holocaust-industry” which usually describes help for Israel.
He clearly voices his sympathies for classic monarchy. He explains that kings acted responsibly because things were their property. This is the sort of superficial feel-good nonsense that placates conservatives he wants to ensnare. Kings and emperors and pharaohs were not stern bearded noble daddy figures who took care of the people. I wish they had been.
The ludicrously expensive palaces were not responsible. Spending the money on pyramids in the belief the pharaohs could continue to exist after death was irrational. Leaders consulted oracles and practiced outrageous mystery cults. The inbreeding turned pharaohs into retarded cripples, the Habsburgs into mutants and it caused diverse issues among Welfs. The Assyrian empire relished in skinning people.
Hoppe is missing one of the deciding factors that made standard classic empires outdated: Modern science. Before it, empires needed territory for the serfs to farm grain which paid for the professional soldiers to defend the territory. Abolishing serfdom and experimenting with freedom may have worked for a short time in smaller or obscure places. You ran the risk of being overrun by a tyrannical empire. Therefore we can’t simply explain the past with our modern understanding of pathological evil. But we also can’t explain the past without it.
For Hoppe, the rulers of old were not really lawmakers, but rather applied “old and eternal laws”. He says there was “little demand for demagogy” or redistribution of wealth. Again, he wants to ensnare conservatives. Rulers copied from past rulers. Any empire was more or less based on the same template.
Hanging, drawing and quartering was the usual punishment until the 19th century in Britain for high treason. From King Henry IV onwards, more offences were made treasons; most legislation on the subject was passed during the reign of Henry VIII. It became high treason to deface money; to escape from prison whilst detained for committing treason, or to aid in an escape of a person detained for treason; to commit arson to extort money; to refer to the Sovereign offensively in public writing; to counterfeit the Sovereign’s sign manual, signet or privy seal; to refuse to abjure the authority of the Pope; to marry any of the Sovereign’s children, sisters, aunts, nephews or nieces without royal permission; to marry the Sovereign without disclosing prior sexual relationships; attempting to enter into a sexual relationship (out of marriage) with the Queen or a Princess; denying the Sovereign’s official styles and titles; and refusing to acknowledge the Sovereign as the Supreme Head of the Church of England.
For Hoppe the monarchist state was “moderate and mild”. He describes there were few taxes. The systems were supposedly “not very intrusive and oppressive”. If Hoppe gave a realistic picture of the past he could forget about recruiting conservatives for his rebellion.
He wants to go beyond monarchy: No state whatsoever, systems where everything is private. In his theoretical model of course everything works out, his pure libertarian mechanisms defeat “parasitic” lazy people and all other problems. We don’t live in a vacuum however. The power groups in the world are not giving up their government tools. If they were to weaken state mechanisms it would be paired with a strengthening of their economic tools and vehicles.
He calls his theoretical model the “natural order” with a “natural elite”. Bad things happen when we deviate from what he calls natural. There is a case of course for hierarchies but to create one that is healthy is incredibly difficult. When we see how he describes past empires it becomes highly questionable how he would judge people who claim these “natural” attributes. The cult that formed around Ayn Rand glorified leading industrialist tycoons. In her famous novel these characters and the savior martyr “John Galt” move to a secret enclave while the outside world collapses due to incompetence. It is nothing but a fantasy to keep frustrated libertarians warm at night.
In Hoppe’s theoretical model insurance companies regulate things. Police, justice and even warfare is corporate. The simplistic libertarian theoretical mechanisms make everything work. Of course vastly different ideologies created such utopias on paper.
One has to be careful when talking to one of Hoppe’s followers. They can flip to the theoretical sphere at the drop of a hat so they can claim to be right about everything, to be invincible in their own head. Any radical libertarian anarchist has three categories of arguing:
- Foundational principles. These are kept super-simple to make them seem untouchable and self-evident. Like the holiest of holy: The non-aggression principle. If you disagree with the totality of it you may be labeled a fascist or socialist. Deviation is regarded as a slippery slope that let’s the demons in.
- The theoretical pie-in-the-sky society that only exists in the minds of radical libertarians. It is used as a universal argument for everything.
- The actual ways in which we are supposed to get towards this super-society. Usually they mean secessions, podcasts and ghosting non-believers.
Most of the book is standard libertarian thought. He then describes how elites used to form: Special talents, more bravery than others, more money, more respect. It’s this mythical “natural authority”. But then, these allegedly wonderful leaders decided to make modern nation states. And these states made wars worse, he argues, reaching “total” wars.
Elites changed some of the old imperial ways to get more scientific innovation and industrial production to increase war-making capacity. Trad systems who didn’t adapt became losers. The Roman empire was multicultural, not because the leadership was democratic or Marxist. Different populations were conquered and absorbed. When today’s Western elites introduced highly problematic migration it was mainly a ploy to divide and conquer, not some theoretical mechanisms of democracy and socialism. It is disguised as democracy and socialism.
Hoppe promises conservatives that in his fantasy society they can keep out homosexuals, “blasphemers” and whomever if they can afford it. But a powerful state, or an empire, is what really warms the hearts of conservatives. Not Hoppe’s bag of promises about taking away state power.
On page 523, almost the end of the book, he finally gets to the point of how to make any actual progress towards his dream society: Creating free territories by means of secession. A revolution from below to break away little parts from a country. That’s it.
