“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”
― H.L. Mencken
― H.L. Mencken
Trump, on the other hand, is quite rude. The Right loves this. In fact, I think it's what they like most about him. He played the heel, but they made him the babyface. I'm far from the only one that has commented on the irony of the "silent moral majority" supporting a whoremongering, philandering, lying casino owner as the agent of God, chosen to restore America's greatness. But he says mean things about people the Right doesn't like. They see him as their great defender against the cultural Marxist weirdos they see on tv. They will forgive him any biblical sin as long as he continues in this role.
It's not a novel point to say that the Left and Right are hypocritical bastards who are always ready to use sophistry to defend enforcing their own particular preferences on their opposition while, at the same time, arguing that they should personally be left to freely live life however they see fit. But the group that has earned the lion's share of my ire since the Trump election is the "libertarians". The closed border libertarians, to be precise.
Full disclosure: I consider myself to be a libertarian. For years I have been reading books and websites that promote and defend the ideas of classical-liberalism. They almost always took a tone of pessimism and suspicion toward any government exercise of power. But then Trump came along and promised to stop Mexicans from getting across that imaginary line on the south side of Texas and suddenly the tone changed. The focus changed from defending individual liberty to defending a specific culture, namely, middle-class white Christian culture.
One of the greatest lessons that should have been learned from the classical liberals, such as Frederic Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, and F.A. Hayek, is that the more laissez-faire capitalism is allowed to flourish, the less reason there is for conflict between different groups. The functioning of capitalism is dependent on peace and the defense of private property. The State, on the other hand, survives on conflict. The State confiscates private property and dubs it "public property". It's your property and my property. But maybe I would like to see a factory built on that property and you would like a lovely flower garden. They cannot simultaneously exist there. We have an inherent conflict created by the State. But the State has a solution. It will provide us an opportunity to vote for a candidate that may or may not resolve this conflict to our liking. Whichever candidate gets more than 50% of the votes gets to decide what shall be done with "our" property. So, we take to to the streets and we take to social media and argue with all the evil people with whom we differ on this subject. One candidate ultimately proves victorious and then, in all likelihood, does whatever his biggest donors want anyway. If a factory is built, you blame me. If a factory is not built, I blame you. The State gets off virtually scot-free.
The same rule applies when we're talking about cultural conflicts. Whether or not a business has signs in Spanish, whether or not someone with a penis can use the women's bathroom, whether or not a sign says "merry Christmas" instead of "happy holidays", whether or not someone has to bake a cake for your wedding, whether or not you can have a public prayer to Jesus, whether or not you can have a public prayer to Allah, and whether or not you can freely cross the Rio Grande are all conflicts that are either exploited by the State or created by it in the first place.
Libertarians used to say they understood that. But now instead of directing their aforementioned pessimism and skepticism toward the head of State, they've been directing it toward his detractors. This is fine when we're talking about the war mongering neo-cons who feel like Trump is too cozy with Russia for the simple reason that he's not dropping bombs on the Russian people. What concerns me is the constant defense of Trump's wall. These "closed border" libertarians do not like Mexicans and others freely traveling to America and liken it to trespassing. Suddenly, and only in this special instance, public property is magically turned into private property. Heretofore, the State has had too much power in every respect except one: They can't stop the inflow of "illegals". The "libertarians" prescribe more power to the State.
Of course, they don't say, "I want less Spanish speaking brown people in my country". They say that the welfare state and open borders are incompatible. The argument runs that foreigners are more likely to vote for socialists who promise to award them a bigger share of the welfare pie. Keeping them out is tantamount to self defense. They want to steal our property and redistribute it to themselves. Let's put aside the fact that the welfare state was overwhelmingly chosen by white Americans and that white Americans still support it in massive numbers. If you take these "closed border" folks at their word, they don't mind the color of the skin of the people coming here. It's the ideas of that group which they wish to quarantine. They are advocating that the State control the flow of ideas. This is the opposite of libertarianism. It is Statism.
I guess I have Donald Trump to thank for exposing this dark side of so many people who I thought were in my ideological camp. And though I agree with Mencken's pronouncement that "it is better to know than to be ignorant", it's disappointing to realize that I'm even more alone in my views on human freedom than I originally supposed.
