Nationalists want to play the “compromise” game, where everyone else does the compromising.
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On 6/13/2020, Yoram Hazony tweeted the following:
Liberals have two choices:
— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) June 13, 2020
1 Submit to the Left.
2 Alliance with nationalists, conservatives, and Christians.
There are no other choices.
“Liberals,” to people like Hazony, basically means anyone to the left of Rick Santorum, so I guess they would include me and my fellow libertarians. After all, Dennis Prager, or the only reason you’ve ever heard of Yoram Hazony, called Ron Paul a full-on leftist for saying black people are more likely to get capital punishment than white people. (By the way, Paul was right when he said that.)
To be blunt, I don’t trust an alliance with Yoram Hazony for a large number of reasons. Mostly because we have entirely different values and goals for society (for one, I’m an anti-nationalist, and he wrote a book called The Virtue Of Nationalism) and, as such, any “alliance” we create would basically be him demanding I make all the concessions. That is not an alliance, that is me giving up to defeat this enemy that none of you can define properly while I get browbeaten for believing in freedom.
Do you want to see where an alliance with people like Hazony leads you? Two days after this Tweet, the Supreme Court determined anti-discrimination laws include a ban on discrimination for firing LGBT people just for being LGBT. This caused Hazony’s friend Josh Hammer to say the following on Twitter:
There is no intellectually compelling reason for the continuation of a conservative/libertarian alliance.
— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) June 15, 2020
Whether there remains a compelling purely political reason is perhaps a different analysis. But that intellectual ship, to the extent it hadn’t already sailed, sailed today.
Hey, anyone remember a few years back when Ann Coulter blamed Barry Goldwater’s loss in 1964 on him being a “libertarian purist” who was against the Civil Rights Act? Now it’s the fault of libertarians that courts have expanded anti-discrimination laws to further ban discrimination?
As for Hammer’s comment, yes, it is weird (and that’s putting it nicely) that he’s more worried about libertarians “taking over the Republican Party” than he is white nationalists doing the same. Yes, he does think “libertarian” just means anything he doesn’t like but can’t call “liberal” or “left-wing” without being laughed out of the room. And yes, Hammer thinks the only libertarian to ever exist is Ayn Rand.
However, I had no idea we ever made an alliance in the first place. To be clear, I do not want to be part of an alliance with Josh Hammer, mostly because I think there are bigger issues in the world than legal pornography or Google existing.
I’m not making the second one up, by the way. Senator Hawley tweeted on the 17th that the federal government should do an investigation into Google’s search algorithms. With the COVID-19 lockdowns still going down in many states and the backlash to the death of George Floyd not slowing down any time soon (especially after Rayshard Brooks was killed on the 13th), I think the federal government has bigger issues than Google.
In fact, going back to Hammer, looking at his reaction to the aforementioned Supreme Court case that banned LGBT discrimination. Here’s what he had to say on the subject first:
The crisis moment for the “conservative legal movement” has arrived.
— Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) June 15, 2020
The Roe v. Wade of religious liberty is here, and it was delivered by golden boy Neil Gorsuch.
What comes next?
For the record, 71% of Republicans agree that LGBT people should count as a protected class under anti-discrimination laws. But yes, Mr. Hammer, this mild Supreme Court decision with the support of 82% of the general public, is going to be the beginning of the end of libertarianism. Just like Trump’s victory was supposed to be, by the way. We are at almost four years since nationalism won in the United States (and over four years since it won in Europe through Brexit before losing basically everywhere else).
The fact is, cultural conservatism is not going to take off. Poor people, who are the only people populists can appeal to, tend to not like being told by rich people that they’re greedy for caring more about if they have a job than if pornography is legal. (Yes, I know I keep bringing that up, but that’s one of the issues that started this split and, as such, I have to keep reminding them that’s the hill they chose to die on.)
What cultural conservatives say they want is for libertarians to give up because otherwise the left will make them give up. (It’s weird seeing this idea expressed by Michael Knowles, who once said being “anti-PC culture” was the only thing that determined if you were on the right or not.) In truth, they want us to give up because they can’t win if we still exist. This is not because we stop unity, or some other piece of nonsense they spew while promising us we’re just a small minority anyway who’s responsible for all the world’s problems. (The size of our noses has yet to be determined.) This is because our ideas appeal much more to the common man than the ideas of cultural conservatives who tell them they are evil for daring to care about the economy.
Why would I make a deal with them?
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