Democracy: The False God

How Libertarians Embraced Kings

When you think of American libertarians, what comes to mind?

Perhaps a bow-tied, bespectacled, and strangely arrogant college boy with tomes of Ayn Rand under his right arm, and the U.S. Constitution under his left? In other words, a nerdy loser?

That used to be my impression, but I have since learned that libertarians are a diverse bunch. If they agree on anything, it is allegiance to minimum government and strong property rights. On other issues, such as open borders and homosexuality, they are at odds. This should not surprise us; as late as 2016, the U.S. Libertarian Party won 3 percent of the popular vote, which amounts to 4.5 million people — enough to swing presidential elections.

Trump addressed The Libertarian National Convention. CREDIT: Jim Watson/AFP.

Donald Trump acknowledged this in his own 2024 campaign. On May 25th, Trump made a surprise visit to The Libertarian Party’s national convention. Speaking to the assembled crowd, he said,

[If you vote for me] I will put a Libertarian in my cabinet… Or you can keep going the way you have for the last long decades and get your 3%… No! You want to make yourself winners. It’s time to be winners.

His plea worked; the party’s members seem to have swarmed to the Trump/Vance ticket, and the Libertarian Party fared poorly in the general election, much below its usual performance.

(As an aside, Trump did not keep his word on placing a libertarian in his cabinet — unless one deems Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who briefly sought The Libertarian Party’s nomination and is now Health and Human Services Secretary, to be a fulfillment of Trump’s vow.)

Angela McArdle, former chair of The Libertarian National Committee. CREDIT: Rising.

The idea to invite Trump to the libertarian convention came from

Angela McArdle

, chair of The Libertarian National Committee. McArdle, who looks exactly like one would expect her to — with her thin frame, frizzled blonde hair, pale skin, black-rimmed glasses, and a resting bitch-face — is a practical woman, who realized that libertarians would get nowhere unless they struck a deal with the Republican establishment.

McArdle also heads The Mises Caucus, a band of libertarians who call themselves ‘paleo-libertarians,’ clinging to free markets and balanced budgets, who are also anti-abortion, against open borders, and anti-LGBT. They are, in effect, traditionalists who are radically pro-market and love the gold standard. Many of them are even monarchists.

To understand this strange breed of political animal, I dived into Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, a collection of essays on how best to structure a society, based on libertarian principles. Hoppe, a retired professor who taught at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, makes a bold claim in his treatise: that monarchy is better than democracy if we care about liberty and human flourishing. He also argues for closed borders and against sexual permissiveness.

If there ever was a based libertarian, then Hoppe is it.

To be clear, Hoppe is not a monarchist. Rather, his argument is that, both from a historical and philosophical standpoint, monarchs are not as bad as elected parliaments. This is because a king’s realm is his private property, and he will therefore want to improve and protect its value. By contrast, a parliament is only responsive to the voters, whose whims are short-term and emotional, and as a result, the country will suffer from the madness of mobs.

German children make kites out of worthless banknotes in the 1920s.

Hoppe, who is German, likely thought of The Weimar Republic, the post-WWI German democracy which floundered under hyperinflation in the 1920s; housewives burned banknotes for heat and children made paper money into toys, because of how worthless the currency had become, with prices rising by 29,500 percent per month. By contrast, when the Hohenzollern emperors ruled Germany, prices were more stable; in times of peace, the Hohenzollerns kept yearly inflation below 1 percent, thanks to their use of gold and silver money.

Indeed, the German people achieved cultural, military, and economic might under powerful monarchs. Philosophers like Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche flourished under kings and princes. Germany held colonies in Africa and Asia in the late 19th Century. By 1900, Germany became the world’s third-largest economy, and its universities produced geniuses such as Max Planck.

This efflourescence was not to last. Under the Weimar Republic, which eradicated monarchy, Germany suffered steep decline. Its economy was squeezed to a shadow of its former self, and it was forced to pay tribute to France and Britain. Some of this was an outcome of Germany’s surrender after World War I, but other trends are hard to ignore: such as The Weimar Republic’s sexual perversion, which included gay nightclubs, promiscuity, and transgender surgeries. When Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, he tore up The Treaty of Versailles and, ignoring the insults of democracy, restored Germany to its former glory.

Hohenzollern Castle, seat of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

None of this is accidental; Hoppe argues that democracy leads to worse political, economic, and moral outcomes because it encourages short-termism. He frames this around the concept of “time preference” — how a person values consumption today, as opposed to consumption in the future. A society which delays consumption, and saves more for the future, can accomplish economic prosperity, as well as scientific, cultural, and political breakthroughs. Notre Dame Cathedral and The Hagia Sophia were not built by men who chose to “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” A kingly society focuses on long-term outcomes, because the king wants his property to continue beyond his death.

Democracy promotes high time preference, preferring present gratification to future glory. As Hoppe writes,

Instead of maintaining or even enhancing the value of the government estate, as a king would do, a president (the government’s caretaker or trustee) will use up as much of the government resources as quickly as possible, for what he does not consume now, he may never be able to consume. In particular, a president (as distinct from a king) has no interest in not ruining his country.

Hoppe then claims that wars between kings were less destructive than wars between democratic states, because the former kept damage to a limit. I am not entirely convinced: a counterexample is the European wars of religion, which saw a massive death toll when the continent was ruled by monarchs. The bloody Thirty Years’ War, for instance, was fought between the Habsburg Monarchy and a confederation of mostly royal states, such as The Swedish Empire and Principality of Transylvania. Hoppe does not consider such case studies in detail.

Nor does he address the elephant in the room: the U.S. and United Kingdom, countries which enjoyed untold flourishing under electoral democracy, in which the monarch was either removed or castrated. To be sure, democracy only works well among those with English and Celtic blood, including the early American settlers. Other ethnicities have failed to sustain democracy for a long time, falling to its corrupting influences, or curtailing it severely — witness France’s recent ban on right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen from running for office. Yet, the Anglosphere’s success with democracy is not taken up by Hoppe.

That caveat aside, I tend to agree with him: I would prefer to live under a prince than under globohomo tyranny, which adopts the pretence of democracy. Hoppe’s claims are broadly correct: the typical man historically had more freedom under monarchs than under elected representatives, a point political scientist David Stasavage also makes in The Decline and Rise of Democracy. However, this thesis should be subject to more rigorous empirical testing and more investigation.

After a few lengthy, and frankly repetitive, essays on monarchy and democracy, Hoppe turns to how to best order society. In “On Free Trade and Restricted Immigration,” he inveighs against open borders. This stems from libertarian premises: I can choose whom to invite into my house, and who to reject. Free trade, a standard libertarian doctrine, contradicts open borders:

[P]opulation movements, unlike product shipments, are not per se mutually beneficial events, because they are not always… the result of an agreement between a specific receiver and sender. There can be shipments (immigrants) without willing domestic recipients. In this case, immigrants are foreign invaders and immigration represents an act of invasion. Surely, a government’s basic protective function would include the prevention of foreign invasions and the expulsion of foreign invaders.

This argument is fatal to open borders proponents like Bryan Caplan and Alex Nowrasteh, laying bare their logical inconsistencies. If libertarians start from the premise of no coercion, then immigration, without the people’s consent, is coercive and thus invasive.

The cure to this, says Hoppe, is to allow immigrants, but only under the condition that they are personally invited by a business or individual, under a contract that can be terminated at will — which would trigger deportation. The immigrant’s behaviour, while they are in the country, is the responsibility of the host, who can be prosecuted lest the invitee commit crimes or incur civil damages. The only way for the immigrant to become a citizen would be through the purchase of property, which would give him a stake in the nation’s future. This simple policy would probably be effective: it would trigger the exile of the Third World refuse that has leeched onto Western countries, and would promote only truly valuable immigrants — not H1-B scammers.

Hoppe then explores his premise, that immigration should be mutually consensual, in “On Cooperation, Tribe, City, and State,” in which he extends it to include the ejection of undesirables from polite society. He suggests that a multiethnic society will eventually fall prey to identity politics and perversions like “homosexuality, lesbianism, communism and occultism.” A well-ordered libertarian city must carefully choose who lives within its gates.

In sum, this is a useful and thought-provoking work, though it may be hard-going for most readers. Hoppe couches his reasoning in technical jargon, and his writing style is plodding and inelegant. Those without an elementary grasp of economics or philosophy may struggle. Still, the arguments in Democracy: The God That Failed are fascinating, and reveal an undercurrent of libertarianism that is perhaps unknown to the public.

Hoppe did not convince me to shed my authoritarian cloak, regardless of how based he is. He conveniently ignores the question of power, and why a libertarian society has never worked in practice. In previous interviews, Hoppe has said, “my dream is of a Europe which consists of 1,000 Liechtensteins.” Liechtenstein, a landlocked country bordering Switzerland with 40,000 inhabitants, is ruled by a prince with actual power, who can veto legislation. However, if Liechtenstein were not protected by the Swiss and its high altitude in the mountains, then it would have been swallowed up by the Austro-Hungarians a long time ago.

A Europe with 1,000 Liechtensteins would tend towards centralization and expansion; indeed, that has been the tale of Europe over the past millennium, with German and Italian unifications being some of the latest examples. A right-wing libertarian paradise, were it to be built today, would be swiftly invaded by a globohomo foe intent on forcing gay pride marches and abortion on its inhabitants, under the pretence of “bringing democracy to the region.” Perhaps if such a free-land were to adopt a nuclear bomb, then that would offer protection.

Ron Paul, chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus. SOURCE: Gage Skidmore.

However, there is a more practical problem with libertarianism: it cannot defeat the Leftist regime. Libertarians have failed to make significant political gains in the U.S., preferring to remain ideological purists and “beautiful losers,” to use Sam Francis’s phrase. Professor John Hospers, the Libertarian Party’s first presidential candidate, realized this and later joined The Republican Party, establishing its Liberty Caucus — of which Ron Paul was chairman. Most libertarians are also not of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s mind; they support globohomo (the odious Cato Institute comes to mind), and are thus of no threat to the Regime.

In my heart, I yearn for a society bound by Hoppe’s teachings: I am by nature freedom-loving, and suspect that libertarianism can only function in the strictly moral, homogenous land Hoppe envisions. Yet, until we eradicate Leftism and jail its elite supporters, there can be no striving towards the promised land. Everything else is a fool’s game.

Still, Hoppe’s work, as well as that of other likeminded libertarians like Dave Smith, suggest that libertarians are not necessarily our enemies. We can work with them towards common goals, against our Leftist overlords. As Hoppe writes in the chapter, “On Conservatism and Libertarianism,”

It should be obvious then that libertarians must be moral and cultural conservatives of the most uncompromising kind. The current state of moral degeneration, social disintegration and cultural rot is precisely the result of too much — and above all erroneous and misconceived — tolerance… Libertarians, in their attempt to establish a free natural social order, must strive to regain from the state the right to exclusion inherent in private property.

To which I respond: great! With such libertarians, who are willing to set aside ideological differences, we should join together as allies. After we have defeated the Left, and the Trudeaus, Netanyahus and Faucis of the world are rotting away in some dark dungeon in Saskatchewan, then we can quibble over the right kind of polity. Who knows? Maybe that will end up being a right-wing libertarian state, but I highly doubt it.