Liberty Fighters: Understand The Foundational Importance Of Churches Against Statism

Daily Caller News Foundation has a new article out. From As Long As Libertarians Reject Traditional Institutions, They’re As Doomed As America:

Rejecting the traditional centers of civic society, particularly church and family, is a big part of popular culture and not a small part of the libertarian culture as well. Libertarians who underestimate those institutions as forces against statism are kidding themselves. Neither should libertarians belittle the preservation of nationality or cultural inheritance for the same reason.

To the detriment of their cause, some libertarians sneer at these social structures and retreat to more familiar ideological territory. The individual owns himself and has natural rights, yes. But he is also the product of his family, religion, and communities.

The state has a vital interest in usurping or quashing those structures, because it craves control, even over an individual’s sense of purpose. It is no coincidence that as more people have detached themselves from those institutions, the state has rapidly gained support.

On the one hand, it is readily acknowledged that the welfare state crowded out private charity. But for some reason, it is less widely accepted that the state has supplanted the family and church, which inspired voluntary giving in the first place.

Think of it in terms of libertarian strategy if nothing else.

Resistance to the state will have to come from the bottom-up. The strongest communities will lead the way, refusing cooperation with federal agencies. Such a route via nullification is already emerging, though it is heavily partisan, regarding immigration and marijuana most notably.

Decentralization in politics has much greater potential than that, however, if enough solid communities are developed. That requires upstanding families and a transcendent bond among neighbors, most often nurtured within a church.

The LGBT community, as an example, is not a real community. Politics is the most popular outlet for a contrived sense of belonging. But there is no posterity-serving community subsisting in activist groups.

As Christian O’Brien and Lex Villena of 1791 might put it, “[without] a transcendent ideal,” such a community is “a tool without a function.”

Beyond practical strategy, it can hardly be denied that resistance to the state would be magnified if the people were fighting for something, not just against the state’s illegitimacy, though that is noble on its own.

Fighting for liberty won’t cut it unless that word means more than its abstraction. Here again, the institutions in which people find meaning must be considered. Our society is aware of the crisis in meaninglessness, but the top-down solutions amount to little more than binge-watching TV, welfare, or opioids, if not women’s marches or the like.

Witness the dramatic rise in deaths of despair, suicide, and drug- and alcohol-related deaths. The crisis of social isolation in America, where 25 percent of people say they have no one to confide in, and where 75 percent of people struggle with loneliness, is also related.

Libertarians ought to be interested in how Americans dealt with loneliness in the pre-welfare state days of the late 19th century.

The battle against statism is a long one. But Hans-Hermann Hoppe was also right to say, “we want guerrilla warfare rather than conventional warfare.” Therefore, libertarians should prioritize marriage and having kids, or otherwise contribute to churches or community centers that uphold the kind of environments that help children thrive. Or perhaps at least they could start by opposing the drag queen story hour at the local public library.

Finally, libertarians should engage with nationhood and see it as a healthy institution against the state. Murray Rothbard wrote that the nation is the “third and much neglected aspect of the real world” after the individual and the state.

Pursuing a libertarian nation is, of course, a further goal in the bottom-up revolution. But it bears mentioning here, because it would be a logical extension of the communities that serve their families.

Nations can be of almost any size, defined by one or more ethnicities, languages, religions, or any mixture of these cultural aspects. They can have closed or open borders, though under full privatization, they would probably not have unconditionally open borders.

With these institutions in mind, libertarians can combat leftists pushing communistic equity, while also not forfeiting to rightists the importance of economic laws and a societal order based on property rights. More than ever, it is time not to yield to evil, but to proceed ever more boldly against it.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.

 

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