Our Enemy, The State

Or, why I'm sympathetic to a little anarchy now and then

Dear Substack Readers, forgive this post, as I’m merely venting and speculating, offering possibilities rather than affirming realities. But days like today make me very pensive and, admittedly, overly introspective. After all, it’s the 80^th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

It strikes me that this is what governments—socialist, fascist, communist, democratic—do best: they annihilate civilians. It makes me very skeptical of the state as an institution. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hypothesizing the withering of the state into some kind of utopia. If anything, I fear the opposite, that states will continue to metastasize and suffocate and swallow us. It seems to be the direction of things to come.

And, admittedly, I’ve been very influenced by Albert Jay Nock, Robert Nisbet, J.R.R Tolkien, Gerard Casey, and Bob Higgs. That is, I think there are some serious arguments the anarchists have made, and I think we’d be foolish to dismiss their critiques simply because the word “anarchist” makes us uncomfortable.

With St. Augustine, for example, I think that a state without justice is mere robbery. With Tolkien, as another example, I think the worst job any human being can have is to boss others around.

When I was a child, conservatism meant a restraint of political power—all political power. Now, it seems, as populism has swamped conservatism, conservatives are more than happy to harness, use, and manipulate the power of the state, as long as it’s their guy in charge.

I hear so many arguments. The state can wage a war against poverty and homelessness. The state can end racial and sexual discrimination. The state can fundamentally reshape our culture. The state can guarantee education for all our children.

And, let’s just take the American federal government for a moment. The federal government that removed American Indians from their lawful lands can bring us justice? The federal government that segregated blacks from whites during World War I can bring us justice? The federal government that stole Indian children from their biological parents and sterilized Indian women (well into the 1970s) can bring us justice? The federal government that interred Japanese-Americans during World War II can bring us justice? The federal government that wiped out innumerable civilians in Dresden and Nagasaki can bring us justice? That federal government?

Not, of course, that our government is any worse than totalitarian ones. It should be remembered—indeed, never forgotten—that:

· The Chinese Communists murdered—through the apparatus of the state—65 million of their own people.

· The Soviet Communists murdered—through the apparatus of the state—62 million of their own people.

· The National Socialists of Germany murdered—through the apparatus of the state—21 million of their own people.

I sadly shake my head when I hear folks claiming that warfare is the greatest killer of all time. Just looking at the twentieth century, states murdered well over 205 million civilians. Warfare, by contrast, took 50 million lives of soldiers. In other words, the state killed at a rate of 4:1 when compared with warfare.

Yesterday, I was re-reading Christopher Dawson and realizing why I never was a man of the left (ever in my life). The left has always wanted to politicize everything, and I want the political sphere to be as minimal as possible. My loyalties are to the private sphere of associations, to families, to colleges, to small businesses, to small property owners. Politics ruins all that is beautiful in this world. Sadly, conservatism is moving in this direction as well. For most of the last century, though, as Bill Buckley said, it stood athwart history. Now, politics, indeed, has conquered our imagination, crowding out art, culture, and religion. A travesty.

So, yes, I still believe in a limited constitutional republic—backed by a bill of rights—as the best form of governance. But, I’m not a fool. I see very well what states are capable of doing and what they always tend towards—concentration, abuse of power, and murder.