I’m not prepared to let go of this Richard Spencer thing just yet. Sorry, everybody who’s desperately sick of it, but it’s hip, topical stuff that exposes a quite frankly worrying trend in the liberty movement. Quick recap for the benefit of anybody who has wisely ignored my previous diatribes on the subject but who has foolishly chosen to read this one: The International Students For Liberty Conference was this past weekend, and a faction of students in the SFL calling themselves the "Hoppe Caucus" invited Richard Spencer to come get together with them at a bar near the conference to discuss his ideas. Mayhem then ensued, Jeffrey Tucker got involved, and then everybody got kicked out, which is a win for liberty because it made it harder for Richard Spencer to talk to people who wanted to talk to Richard Spencer, and I guess we’re supposed to think that’s absolute aces.
That’s not really what I came to talk about today. I came to talk about this one narrow little concept that I’ve seen echoed in a lot of libertarish responses to the Spencer fiasco. Because he’s handy, I’ll pick on Robby Soave again, but this is purely illustrative; Soave is nowhere near the only person saying things like this.
Spencer is entitled to broadcast his vile opinions, and to make equal use of public resources. He should not be attacked on the street, or anywhere else. But no private actor is required to give him a platform — otherwise, property rights would cease to matter.
Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Hey, aren’t you a libertarian? Don’t you believe in private property? Clearly kicking Spencer out was merely an exercise of private property rights!
Sure. Here’s the thing, though. The "private property" in question belonged neither to Jeffrey Tucker nor to his lynch mob. It was an ordinary bar, the owners of which clearly had no problem with Richard Spencer sitting at one of their tables, peacefully discussing his views with people who came to listen to him. Presumably he was buying things; I don’t really know, and it doesn’t really matter. The point is that this smug, weirdo narrative implies that the owners of the bar were like "whoa, Richard Spencer? We don’t like your kind around these parts!" when that clearly is not the case. No, what happened was that the Tuckerites, irritated that a guy they didn’t like was talking to people, whooped and wailed and caused a riot until management decided that this whole thing had gotten out of hand and cleared out the lot of them.
Far from being a victory for libertarian ideals of private property rights, this is a horrible violation of private property rights. Spencer was clearly permitted on the premises; his use of the bar’s private property was consensual. He was removed only after the kids used that property in an unapproved manner, at which point the whole gathering was ousted. It was the alleged "libertarians," and not Spencer at all, who were the violators who had to be physically removed, so to speak.
Intentionally creating a disturbance and implicating somebody else in it in the hopes of getting him evicted by the owner of the establishment is behavior obviously unworthy of an adult, much less a libertarian. Yet so many libertarishes seem to have convinced themselves that anything is fair game when one is "bashing the fash" that this sort of barbaric spectacle is not only tolerated, but positively cheered.
The libertarian solution to the "problem" of a guy you don’t like saying words you can’t stand is to go somewhere else, obviously. The idea that there is a certain libertarian orthodoxy that positively cannot contain Richard Spencer is ludicrous; libertarianism is such a tiny, narrow thing that it would be easy to accommodate white nationalism within it. Just get rid of the aggressive violence, and, hey presto! If I don’t like non-white people, in what way is it possibly illibertarian for me to move away from them? Does anybody have a right to live near me? Obviously not. I cannot violently expel those people from their homes, but I can go somewhere else myself. What if I get a whole group of like-minded people together, and we go move off somewhere together and start our own little "white nation?" Does anybody somehow have some magical right to prevent us from doing so? Again: obviously not. We can buy up some territory, start our own little community, and make our own rules about who is and is not welcome on our property. You might think we’re weirdos and jerks, but then you can stay away from us, too, and everything’s just ducky. But, wait… what did I say at the beginning of this paragraph?
The libertarian solution to the "problem" of a guy you don’t like saying words you can’t stand is to go somewhere else, obviously.
Spoiler warning: that’s the libertarian solution to every problem of the form "there’s somebody I don’t want to be around on property that isn’t mine." Deal with it or leave. "Contrive some weirdo excuse to get the owner of the property to throw you both out" is petty at the very least. No libertarian would question your right to disassociate yourself from people you don’t like! Plenty of libertarishes would, of course, very much including the Libertarish Party’s 2016 presidential nominee, who was justly famous for declaring that the government should be in the business of forcing people to bake cakes for customers they don’t want. One is compelled to wonder how many members of Students For Liberty’s insane clown posse are in that same boat. Jeffrey Tucker, ironically enough, is not — in theory, if not in practice, he understands that the correct solution is to leave a room you don’t want to be in, rather than to appeal to authorities to force your desires on everybody.
So where does that leave us? Or, more importantly, where does that leave the animalistic, herd-minded libertarishes who fought back against Spencer’s horrible "fascism" by violating the property rights of a third party and blaming it all on him? One of the most influential libertarian thinkers wrote a pretty good assessment of this mentality once:
To them, what’s impressive about liberty is that it allows people to assert their individual preferences, to form homogeneous tribes, to work out their biases in action, to ostracize people based on "politically incorrect" standards, to hate to their heart’s content so long as no violence is used as a means, to shout down people based on their demographics or political opinions, to be openly racist and sexist, to exclude and isolate and be generally malcontented with modernity, and to reject civil standards of values and etiquette in favor of antisocial norms.
Next year, Students For Liberty should try to organize a debate between the author of that piece and Jeffrey Tucker. That would be a sight to see!