An Anarchist’s Handbook for the Right
The lesson for anyone on the right to learn from anarchist thought is that you cannot respect the gilded trappings of the state.
Considering former President Trump’s Florida home being raided by the FBI, I think this might be a suitable moment to point out to Republicans and right-wingers what they must learn from us anarchists.
Of course, I am not the “traditional” anarchist. I don’t throw bombs, I’m definitely not a socialist, and I reject the progressive ideal of society (my political beliefs could be described as “Old Right” as much as anything alive today). My foundations are self-ownership, private property, and God’s laws.
But I have a background steeped in anarchist literature, and that provides lessons that are difficult to perceive from the mainstream or right-wing political worldview.
It’s Anarchy All the Way Down
The first rule—one which is perhaps best illustrated in the work of Max Stirner, but which is in no means exclusive to Stirner—of all intellectually tenable anarchist political science is that everything is, in the end, anarchy.
The question is which anarchy you prefer.
There is no state. The state is a philosophical abstraction created by those with an interest in preserving it, from the “intellectual bodyguards of the House of Hohenzollern” to the first guy who figured out that when you have the biggest stick you can say whatever you want and people have to listen.
Instead, you have only social orders. These social orders can take different forms. The best would be voluntary orders, in which everyone agrees to the rules of the game. This could be a religious community, a contractual arrangement (and the social contract is a myth—all binding contracts must be signed freely), or an emergent order stemming from mutual exchange.
However, the order which characterizes the state is always anarcho-tyranny. There are different anarcho-tyranny, of course. It’s probably past the point where we can distinguish the marked difference between ours and the obviously failed totalitarian regimes of fascism and communism by saying that in our anarcho-tyranny you can expect to be left inviolable in your home.
People are fooled in anarcho-tyranny because it is not absolute. This is not mercy or benevolence—or at least not valid evidence to suggest its existence—because the absolute form of anarcho-tyranny is probably never optimal.
The warlord game is dangerous, and it’s a lot easier when you’re wearing a suit and tie and convincing people that some goatherder’s kid on the other side of the world needs to die or else a bunch of people from a different country that we have close political ties to will fly planes into skyscrapers full of people.
Tip the hand too much and reveal that your operating principle is that you will take what you want (and what you can) by force, and suddenly the shame associated with being a warlord goes down.
God did not ordain a particular structure of government into reality—the Biblical arguments for authority are injunctions to heed the wisdom of elders, not to submit to murderers, bandits, liars, and thieves. Of course, they also caution against open rebellion, but one does not need to rebel to recognize the state as little more than a cancerous vestige of ancient warlords.
Do Not Compromise
Your political adversaries are your political adversaries precisely because they seek a different social order than you do.
Do not compromise. This is a pathway to two things.
1. Erosion of what you hold dear.
2. Annihilation of your centers of power.
Of course, I am not saying that one must exclude all others from society and that you will never need to make deals—this will be the case unless one is willing to cut social orders down to a very small size. As an anarchist, this is my ideal, but you do not need to hold this ideal.
When you lose, you need to be planning revenge. When you win, you need to show no mercy.
You can make deals, but they need to be getting you what you want, and not just a seat at the table. Seats at the table don’t matter if the business is foul. Do not play games rigged against you.
Call out your enemies (and it is helpful that this is true of the left) as degenerates and wicked sorts. They want to kill babies, for crying out loud! If your compromise is “oh, well, you can kill some babies” then you’re not standing for anything.
Do not compromise. Fight to win. When you lose, bleed your opponents white. Make every expense costly. When they complain that they do not have seats at the table, revel in their status as losers.
Power is not a zero-sum game, but it’s not an infinitely expanding pie. If you do not understand this then your enemies will wield it against you. Do not surrender institutions. Gatekeep. Reject the notion of tolerance, inclusivity, and fair play.
Make holding your enemies’ beliefs and espousing them openly a cause for termination from employment. Do not let communists advocate for the demise of capitalism one day and pull down a six-figure salary the next. Do not let progressives say that the American social order is evil because of imagined 17th century racism one day and ramble about the “hallowed halls” of our democracy the next.
Play brutal. Play for keeps. Play to win. Remove your political adversaries from power, and make them having a role in society dependent on their willingness to shut their mouths. Return the favor.
Play cliquish, exclusive, elitist games, but only on your own terms. Be rude. Be impolite. These are people who advocate for theft, murder, and the collapse of the social order in a way that even an anarchist like myself considers abhorrent, accompanied as it is not by an attack on parasitism in the system but rather the moral foundations of the God-fearing West. They do not deserve a seat at the table, and they do not deserve to dictate your actions.
Make it About Quality of Life
Your pledge as any political ruling elite is this:
Giving us power and granting us the ability to keep others from having it is going to make your life better.
Even as an anarchist, I’d argue this case in a non-democratic format, since what I’d be asking for in my ideal world is the right and freedom to rid myself (and my community) of bandits.
The current opportunity to do this is high. Remember when gasoline cost two dollars per gallon?
It is entirely acceptable to point out that your adversaries have either intentionally or through gross ineptitude led us to a situation where life is harder for people. You don’t have to sell utopia (and I do not) to point out that things could be better than they currently are.
The ruling elite is not really responsible for everything—there are limits on what they can do. However, the limits on the ruling elite typically come from their inability to improve the situation, not boundaries to their potential to mess things up.
Hit this hard.
Life would be better if we had a different regime, and the right should point out that they are the faction, regardless of form and style, that offers family, home, and food. Their opponents? Chaos, impoverishment, and hunger.
Institutions Are Not Tools
Every institution has a life of its own. This does not make them inherently wrong—I am pro-church, for instance—but it does make them important to assess and be careful about.
These institutions have allegiances, and they don’t have to be good ones. Often the allegiances are internal (we may call these corrupt, but there are also reasons for self-cohesion from a strictly functional perspective, such as a firm on the market, which do not negatively prejudice the institution against outsiders).
The important thing here is to remember that an institution is not a tool, it is an organism. It will fight back against threats to its power, as the progs currently in charge are by waging lawfare.
The prescription for dealing with institutions that go astray vary. I am a fan of inquisitions and gatekeeping, at least within the religious and political contexts, but this may not work for everything. The important thing here is to pay attention to institutions. Too much leeway has been granted to government on the basis of it being a protector of the people.
But the fate of the people at the hands an external organism with a life of its own is not, according to logic, coddling and protection. There is a reason for everything the government and each of its various bureaucratic organs does. This reason is rarely benevolent, and more typically self-serving.
Think of it this way—every tax the state levies (here I refer to the façade for the various bandit groups and warlords that will receive the taxation as a state) takes power from the people. Not only are they unfree to use the fruit of their labor for their own ends, but this grows the state.
Why did the Internal Revenue Service request the freedom and budget to employ 87,000 more bandits? There is only one answer: power. It would have been more apt to name it the Infernal Revenue Service, because it and the Federal Reserve make up the chains of the people.
Conclusion
The lesson for anyone on the right to learn from anarchist thought is that you cannot respect the gilded trappings of the state. The current mask worn by the state is a product of the past two centuries of democratic and Hegelian thought.
This mask is chosen to hide a deformity, and that deformity is this:
The “state” is in reality nothing more than a loose confederation of bandits with their own interests. All attestations to the contrary are either the mistaken bleatings of those who fell for the ruse or a deliberate action to conceal the nature of the game.
Do not compromise with the progressives, those who crafted this mask. Do not let them claim the sacred pedigree of institutions and appeal to any notion of conservatism left in you. Root them out!