I. The Scene The Violence in Charlottesville

The vast majority of people in the United States have no interest whatsoever in street battles between the alt-right (better described today in more poignant terms) and the counter-protesters. Most people have normal problems like paying bills, dealing with kids, getting health care, keeping life together under all the usual strains, and mostly want these weird people to go away. So, of course, people are shocked at scenes of young people in the streets of this picturesque town with a university founded by Thomas Jefferson screaming, “Jews will not replace us.”

It’s hard to see, hard to hear. But they are not going away. For some people with heads full of violent ideology, what’s happened so far is not enough. They imagine that with their marches, flags, uniforms, slogans, chants, screams, and guns, they will cause history to erupt and dramatically turn to favor them over the people they hate. Indeed, what is unfolding right now, with real loss of property and life, has gone beyond politics as usual and presages something truly terrible from the past, something most of us had previously believed was unrepeatable.

What in the world causes such a thing? It’s not about bad people as such. Many of the young men and women involved in this movement were raised in good homes and, under normal conditions, would never hurt anyone. What this is about is bad ideas. They crawl into the brain and cause people to imagine things that do not exist. It can be like a disease that a person doesn’t even know that he or she has. It causes people to seethe with hatred for no apparent reason, to long for the extermination of people who have never done anything wrong, to imagine insane outcomes of social struggles that have zero chance of succeeding.

The Group

The implausibility of their ideas is disguised by group psychology. They hang around people who think these same things and egg each other on in shared resentments and dreams of new powers they can acquire if they act boldly, bravely, and with determination. They conjure up scapegoats (blacks, Jews, women, Antifa, gays, and a government that is supposedly giving them all privileges at their expense) and begin to believe that the only way forward is to destroy them all in some grand uprising, after which they will seize power and rule forever.

Yes, I know it sounds insane. But one thing you learn from history is that no idea is too insane to be off limits to a group infected with a longing to rule. Any means to the end will do, with the end deeply embedded in the fevered imagination of the group member who finds mission, meaning, and significance from some struggle.

The Statue Myth

Much of the media coverage about the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia report that this all began with a dispute over the fate of a statue of the Civil War Confederate general Robert E. Lee that sits downtown. The city council voted to take it down; the protesters want it to remain as a symbol of white pride and rule (which is absurd because General Lee would have been thoroughly repulsed by the ideology these people represent). In actual fact, the dispute over this statue is a complete distraction from the real motivation here.

What this really is: an explosive expression of an idea that has been brewing in a malevolent movement that has been gaining steam for very a long time. After the Second World War, most people imagined that Nazi ideology was gone from the earth and that the only real totalitarian view that remained to threaten liberty was Communism. That might have been true for a few decades, but matters began to change in the 1990s, as new violent strains of statism begin to arise.

The Deep History

For the last two years, I’ve written about the deep history of this violent strain, which can be described variously as Nazism, fascism, alt-right, white supremacy, white nationalism, neo-reaction, or, my preferred and more technical moniker (borrowed from Ludwig von Mises), right-Hegelianism.

People have variously wondered why I’ve spent so much time and energy digging through the works of people like Johann Fichte, Friedrich List, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Charles Davenport, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola, Giovanni Gentile, and so on. All of these ideas existed long before Hitler and the Nazis—and caused enormous damage in the world long before the Holocaust—and they persist after them.

It’s true that probably not even one of the protesters in Charlottesville have read these thinkers, much less the traditional liberal response to these rightist strain of anti-liberalism. How can they possibly be responsible?

Ideas are strangely magical, like time-traveling spiritual DNA, moving from brain to brain like a genetic mutation and just as unpredictably. Keynes was right to observe that most politicians are slaves to some defunct economist; in the same way these violent thugs are slaves to some defunct philosopher who loathed the emergence of universal freedom in the world during the 19th century and were determined to set it back.

Propagandists for Evil

At the same time, there must be some mode of transmission for ideas. The leaders of this movement serve the purpose well, but there is a deeper root. I’ve been very reluctant to mention what might be the most influential tract among the rise of the hard statist right in the last few decades, but given where we are with all of this, it is time. The book is The Turner Diaries, written by “Andrew McDonald” who was really William L. Pierce, a brilliant physicist whose mind was taken over by Nazi ideology, precisely because he was steeped in the literature above.

I do not recommend reading this book. You can’t unread it. It is their roadmap. I can recall the first time I read it. I was shaken to my very core, and it was the beginning of a new realization of the task before us, to combat this horror with every bit of intellectual energy.

It is the story of a small junta of whites who set out to reverse history with a series of killings, starting with Jews, then blacks, then communists, and then, inevitably, apologists for the merchant class and libertarians (they hate us deeply too). What you learn early on here is that this movement is absolutely socialist, just in a different way from the more-famous left-wing socialists. They are not red shirts but brown shirts, so they have a different agenda. It’s not about class struggle. It’s about race struggle, religious struggle, gender identity struggle, national struggle.

So what happens? They rally the masses to their side with a growing amount of bloodshed, gain control of the government, set up a centrally planned socialist state, get hold of the nuclear stockpile and slaughter all non-whites in the world. Sorry for the spoiler.

The Genetic Code

Why would anyone rally behind such a ghastly book? Again, the human mind is capable of imagining terrible things, and that which we imagine to be true influences actions. Ideas, as they say, have consequences. Hence, anyone who has followed the transmission of these ideas over the last decades could see where this is heading.

What happens now? The tragedy is compounded, with a burgeoning leftist movement to counter the emerging threat from the opposite side, and a government ready to exploit the conflict between the two to crack down further on human rights and freedoms. It’s the perfect storm.

Our Task

The question is: what to do now? The answer lies in the source of the problem. The huge mess began with bad ideas. The only means available—and it is the most powerful—is to fight bad ideas with good ideas. We all need to throw ourselves into the intellectual battle most of all and as never before. What are those good ideas?

The progress of the last 500 years shows us precisely what the good ideas are: social harmony, human rights, the aspiration of universal dignity, the conviction that we can work together in mutual advantage, the market economy as a means of peace and prosperity, and, above all else, the beauty and magnificence of the idea of liberty itself.

Let us all—those who love peace, prosperity, and human flourishing for all—not despair but rather rededicate ourselves to the mission of replacing bad ideas with good ones. Our predecessors in this mission faced far worse odds and they prevailed, and they were far fewer than us. We can too, provided we think, speak, and act with courage and conviction in favor of all that is beautiful and true. This is how the left/right cycle of violence will be replaced by the highest longings of the human heart.

Lessons from the Charlottesville March

It’s a rule of social and political movements that they cannot fully control the outcome of their efforts. Actions cause reactions, many of them unanticipated and certainly unintended. This is because no group, no matter how powerful, can control the human minds of others not part of their cause.

This is why so many movements driven by a revolt ethos and revolutionary intentions have created so many unforeseen messes that are often the opposite of their stated aims.

So it is with the “Unite the Right” (alt-right, fascist, white supremacist, revanchist, Nazi, and so on) marchers who descended on the peaceful Virginia town of Charlottesville in August.

Donald Trump and many others like to say that there were “good people” marching too, but this ignores the entire title of the rally. The “Unite the Right” theme meant that anyone participating was necessarily putting aside differences with the Nazis and the Klan in order to achieve the goal of becoming a national political presence (the controversy over the statue of Robert E. Lee was only the excuse).

The aftermath of the march has been a fallout very different from what they expected.

Statues Torn Down

Only a few years ago, the idea of toppling the statues of Confederate generals strewn throughout the South would have been unthinkable. Charlottesville was a test case: perhaps this Lee statue should go, simply because it seems to be a distraction from the progress the citizens want and an unnecessary reminder of a painful past. The city council voted to remove it. This precipitated the rally.

To be sure, there are defensible arguments for recognizing the Confederate dead. But the protesters were not drawn from a heritage society like the Sons of Confederate Veterans (my great-grandfather was a medic in a Southern troop, and I’m named after Jefferson Davis), but rather the hardest and most bitter among the hard-right, anti-liberal ideologues. That association has further fueled the anti-statue movement among activists, and today none are safe. They are being torn down in the dead of night, all over the country, stricken down by city councils all over the South, and condemned as never before. None will likely survive this.

Should the statues stay or not? These statues have a complex history. They were not erected to honor the Confederate dead following the war or even at the end of Reconstruction. Most appeared in the early 1920s to send a message that the race-relation liberalization that happened between 1880 and 1900 would not return. The progress and normalcy would be replaced by a racist/statist/“progressive” movement rallying around new eugenic laws, zoning, white supremacy, forced exclusion, state segregation and so on—policies supported not by the people but by white elites infected with demographic fear and pseudo-science. This is when a movement started putting up these statues, not to honor history but as a symbol of intimidation and state control of association.

The statue in Charlottesville statue went up the same year that immigration restrictions went into place for explicit eugenic reasons, and Jim Crow laws were tight and an entire population group faced what amounted to an attempted extermination (that is not an exaggeration but a description of a well-documented reality).

In other words, Lee (a tragic figure in many ways) was then being drafted by a wicked movement he would likely have never supported, despite all his failings. So the controversy over whether it should stay or go is not really about the war that occurred a half-century before the statue went up but a symbol of racial control. This is the memory we are dealing with here. It’s very similar to how the Neo-Nazis today are abusing his tragic legacy in service of their dangerous agenda.

Public Revulsion

During the presidential campaign in 2015, Hillary Clinton famously attacked the “deplorables” who were supporting Trump, including hard racists and fascists. The result was outrage: it seemed that she was calling all Trump supporters these names. In fact, Trump supporters—so many were just people disgusted by the policies of his predecessor and wanted fundamental change in government—took on the name “deplorable.”

Most people in those days—never forget that most regular people do not follow 4chan or Twitter—had no idea of the burgeoning movement of hard-right ideologues that was gathering at the time, using Trump for their own purposes.

The Charlottesville “Unite the Right” march changed everything. What we saw from online videos and news reports was what looked like a dangerous paramilitary force, none from the city, with optics from the interwar period, carrying torches, Nazi-style insignias, flags, and screaming anti-Semitic and racist slogans. This was not anything like a Tea Party protest. It was something completely different and truly terrifying for the residents of this idyllic town.

In other words, it looked deplorable. It was the breakout of this movement into the mainstream. But instead of fueling some kind of white revolution, the results have been the exact opposite. This movement seems anti-American, filled with hate, unchecked by normal civil engagement, truly dangerous to public order, and of strange foreign origin. This did not look like free speech; it looked like a threat. It was not about demanding freedom but rather demanding power.

This is what accounts for the shock and disorientation among conservative and Republican commentators who want nothing to do with these people and the ideas behind it. From my point of view, this is very good. From the point of view of this movement, it is presumably not what they were going for.

What’s fascinating to me is how these people got to this point of no return, forgetting to check themselves with observations such as: “do you think it is wise that we parade around like the very people the US went to war to defeat only 70 years ago?”

To understand that requires we plunge into the kind of group psychology that leads to such fanatic movements—too much to take on here.

Government Crackdown

The marchers used Virginia’s open-carry laws and protections for free speech and association to their advantage. They also used the plea for tolerating their ideas in order to get a hearing. The ACLU, I believe, was right in fighting for the speech rights of the marchers.

That said, this was not a march about human rights; it was a march about threats to others and a demand for power. It has prompted Justice Department investigations, a resignation from the board of the ACLU, and a widespread questioning of how this fiasco that resulted in so much mayhem was ever tolerated to begin with.

We are nearly guaranteed to see an increase in government surveillance of hate groups, of monitoring of our online communications, of restrictions on political organizing—all in reaction and response and to the cheers of a terrified public.

It is precisely events like this that cause people to lose freedoms, not gain them. If any participants in the “Unite the Right” really believed they were fighting for freedom, they have achieved the opposite. But there is also this: groups like this thrive in persecution. They never go away, especially this one because so much of its ethos is about how they have been suppressed and oppressed. Make them victims and they thrive ever more.

Boost to the Left

The true tragedy of many responses to the march was the false choice it set up: that the only alternative to the alt-right is the leftist antifa. Or conversely, if you hate the leftist antifa, you have no choice but to back the alt-right. This is sheer nonsense. Most of the people resisting what had all the appearances of a Nazi invasion were regular citizens, not antifa. There is nothing “leftist” about resenting the vision of Nazis taking over public spaces.

It was a true inspiration to see the response from the merchant class, condemning racism and fascism in no uncertain terms. Business loves peace and friendship, not hate and civil unrest.

However, politically, it is unclear whether this response will find a voice. The people most in opposition to the rise of the Nazi movement in America has been the left, and the fallout could actually boost the prospects of the Bernie Sanders movement, as revulsion leads to an embrace of its seeming opposite.

Incidentally, this is precisely why it is so important for libertarians to speak out with truth and courageous conviction. We simply cannot allow the left to be the only ideological voice of opposition.

Trump’s Legacy

It is probably too early to say what will define Trump’s legacy in office, but his defense of the marchers, and the equation of their bad elements with the other bad elements that opposed them, might be it. It was the very statement that the most indefensible aspects of the alt-right truly wanted. And it was thus no surprise that even some of Trump’s previous defenders bailed on him in the days following.

You cannot give up your credibility on basic issues like human rights and the dignity of every human life and expect to maintain political support over the long run. We are too far down the path toward peace and universal emancipation to go there. The future is bright and not grim and bloody, as these marchers and their backers imagine.

Many people have predicted the end of the Trump approach before, but something does seem different this time. It’s very sad because Trump has many good ideas—ideas that are evidently not that important to him—and represents too many good causes (for which he has done very little) for this to happen. But when you choose to die on a hill of bigotry and intolerance, there is not enough credibility remaining for anything else.

No movement based on the aspiration to rule and oppress others can fully anticipate how their activities will play out over time. In this respect, the alt-right has done a terrible disservice to itself and perhaps to everyone else as well.

The question is: what are people who love human rights and liberty for all going to do about it? In the end, the only really effective resistance comes in what we believe and how we live our lives. We have seen what we do not love. The real issue is whether we can find and then build what it is we truly do love.

My Lunch with a Nazi

College made me profoundly aware and disdainful of leftist socialist ideology. It was everywhere in every discipline: history, psychology, sociology, ethics, and even economics. The alternative I knew about was called “right wing” or conservatism/libertarianism.

These were the days of the Cold War. Everything was clear. To be pro-American meant to be pro-freedom and certainly not a leftist. The bad guys blamed America for everything and never stopped putting down freedom.

Where do the Nazis fit in here? They didn’t matter in the slightest, except as a matter of history. I took a class in World War II. The impression I had was that Nazis were a cult that came out of nowhere, killed a lot of people, and were then vanquished by the Allied troops. And that was the end. There was little discussion of the ideological structure, its meaning, its import. It was just some weird junta that came and went.

Nazis Exist

That’s where things stood until a very strange lunch in Alexandria, Virginia. Years had gone by. I was perhaps 26 years old. A journalist in Washington, D.C., an acquaintance with some odd views that I couldn’t quite place, had arranged a meeting. He told me of a wealthy philanthropist who I really needed to meet. She could make some good connections for me.

I wasn’t sure I understood what all this was about but I was up for it.

I arrived at the brightly lit and elegant tea room where the waitstaff were bustling around, serving high-end clientele. I sat and waited, and then a hand touched my shoulder.

“Jeffrey Tucker?”

“I am he,” I said and stood up to greet a beautiful woman in her 60s, gorgeously dressed, blonde hair pinned up top. She had flawless manners, a pretty way of speaking, and all the signs of “high birth,” as they say, on top of the classic “beauty that money buys.” I held her chair and seated her. We ordered some small sandwiches and tea and began to talk.

We began with the problem of leftism and how terrible it all is. I was intrigued at the polished cadence of her language. And the way she moved her hands. And her bright and pretty eyes. Her perfume. And the way she smiled and connected with me so personally. I was enjoying this, feeling special.

The nature of the conversation began to shift gradually. The problem was not the left as such, she said, but the global elites. It is they who are behind the corruption of the culture through Hollywood and the media generally. Their power is bad enough, she explained, but the real problem is within the banking system and the world financial system that they own.

I didn’t really understand what she meant by “they” but I didn’t like every movie, so I was okay with a solid attack on Hollywood. And I certainly didn’t like the Fed. I would respond in each case with a point about the problems of government. Each time, she would gently explain to me that the problem is not the government but the people who occupy the government who are building a world order to benefit only one tribe.

I still didn’t entirely understand. Finally, she put a fine point on it.

“The real problem, Jeffrey, and I hope you can come to understand this more fully, is the Jews.”

Ok, now I’m rolling my eyes. Here we go with the cranky stuff. I’ve heard this kind of talk before but mostly from uncouth and uneducated malcontents who seem consumed by class resentment. It was boring and dumb. I must say, however, that I had never heard someone of her beauty and intelligence speak this way. I found it embarrassing more than anything.

I didn’t argue with her, mostly because I wouldn’t even have known where to begin. Mostly I had no real understanding of her outlook, where it came from, what it meant, where she was going with talk of this. In the world I grew up in, I had no consciousness of Jews or non-Jews or anything at all related to this topic.

Above all, I would stop and wonder: why am I having lunch with this person?

She shifted again to talk about her personal biography. Her husband left her a substantial amount of money. She set up her own philanthropic empire. She supported journalists, magazines, institutions, conferences. She is highly careful in her spending, she explained, making sure that she backs people and institutions who know both the problem and the answer.

Now I understood where this was going. She was recruiting me, testing me. Maybe if I studied and learned, and deepened the sophistication of my personal philosophy, I too could benefit from her generosity.

From there, things ramped up quickly. She said, “Well, that’s enough serious talk. Let’s offer a small toast to the greatest man of our century.”

Maybe she meant Reagan? We lifted our glasses. Then she finally came out with it.

“Adolf Hilter.”

Well, now that seemed to come from nowhere. I made a sheepish face and slowly lowered my glass. She knew that she had shocked me but gave a playful smile and engaged in more small talk. I wasn’t listening anymore, simply because I was just a bit distracted by her toast.

At some point in the remaining minutes of this meeting I realized: I was having lunch with a real Nazi. It was not a frothing-at-the-mouth thug with a club and torch. It was a beautiful, erudite, and highly educated woman of high breeding.

Goodbyes

Fortunately, lunch time ended. We did air kisses and polite goodbyes and said we would stay in touch. I walked to my car as quickly as I could without seeming to rush. I sat down and exhaled as much air as I could and took another deep breath. What had just happened? Who was this woman and what did she believe? Why was I sitting there with her?

I never saw her again. Over the coming weeks, I gradually came to realize that this was a very important person, the main source of money for what was then a nascent Nazi movement in America. At the time, the whole thing seemed ridiculous. Today, not so much.

I never had a Nazi professor, never heard a Nazi media commentator, never read a mainstream book promoting Nazism. Until recently, such a bloodthirsty political longing has had to live in dark corners or come in beautifully deceptive packages such as this woman. For this reason, it has mostly escaped the notice of several generations. That doesn’t mean it is not a danger to rationality, decency, and freedom. And it doesn’t mean that it cannot grow and infect the ideological outlook of a new generation.

Another 20 years would go by before I seriously began to study and learn about this warped and freaky branch of totalitarian thought which today goes by many names (fascism, alt-right, neoreaction, and so on). I’ve learned that Nazism was and is the culmination of dangerous ideological tendencies from a century earlier. They didn’t die after the war.

As Ludwig von Mises (one of the most consistent anti-Nazi intellectuals of the 20th century) warned repeatedly: bad ideas are never entirely gone; they come back and back, which is why the friends of liberty must never rest in learning about them and being true champions of the free society.

Over time, I’ve also learned that it is not enough to hate the left, or even to hate the government as it is (occupied or not). It is all about what we love. If we can identify and describe what we love, and with a clean conscience and sincere hope for the good of ourselves and everyone, we are where we need to be to recognize and resist all threats to liberty, from whatever source, beautiful or not.

As for my lunch partner that day, I assume that she is gone from this earth by now. But her ideological children are more numerous than ever.