Right Collectivism- The Other Threat to Liberty, a book by Jeffrey Tucker. Preface by Deirdre McClusckey
This is an essential book to understand the rise of a new form of right wing populism.Jeffrey Tucker is Director at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) founder of Liberty.me, economics adviser to FreeSociety.com, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, and a recognised author in the field of Austrian Economics and Libertarianism in the Classic Liberal tradition.
He gave an interesting interview for the Austrian Center, in which he lays out the main messages of the book.
https://www.austriancenter.com/right-collectivism-interview-tucker/
This is what Tucker believes to be the Classic Liberal position in the face of this new collectivist threat:
“My main concern is that as an intellectual we need to be constantly celebrating the free society and constantly celebrating liberalism as an alternative to the despotism of the left and the despotism of the right — and I genuinely believe that our position is a third way, by just saying that society is better off left alone. Let us be free to choose and associate and speak — live how we want to. We won’t create a perfect world. But it will be the best possible world we can have. And most importantly: the liberal solution is the one that’s most compatible with human rights and human dignity… and we must protect and guard it and treasure and fight for it, if we want to keep it — because it’s constantly under threat from both sides, the left and the right.”
In his words: “… right-wing collectivism is in fact a coherent ideology. It’s not just purely reactive, it’s not just anti-leftist. It is for something, and — I think very crucially and critically — it’s anti-liberal.What happens typically is that you get well-meaning people who decide they don’t like left-wing socialism, and they are looking around for movements that they can join to oppose them. And some of them might have libertarian impulses, or they might just simply want freedom…The purpose in writing the book was to discuss this alternative tradition of statism. It’s another way to control people, it’s another cultural model for managing society from the top-down. That’s what we are talking about.”
“Right-collectivism is different from left-collectivism, because right-collectivism throws out the parts of socialism that the bourgeoisie tends to despise the most… it tends to be against religion, it tends to be suspicious of family, and it tends to want to take people’s property in various forms of regulation, taxation, and so on. Right-collectivism or right-Hegelianism is very happy to give you your religion, your family, and your property so long as all these institutions serve the nation-state. The nation-state becomes really the central unit of right-Hegelianism, it becomes the focus, really the end of history…
That is a classical right-Hegelian view: the end of history is with the nation-state. The people organize according to nationhood, and dictated to by a great leader.”
“The problem is not the immigrants, the problem is the response to the immigrants. We have seen this again and again. F.A. Hayek actually writes that the rise of the Nazis was fueled in part by the growing heterogeneity of Jewish immigration itself, that it’s one thing to have Jews from Germany and from Poland, but when Russian Jews are bringing in new kinds of cultures, that gives rise to a totally unjustified, but populist resentment, which then becomes the source of authoritarianism and intolerance. It’s for this reason actually that F.A. Hayek himself was cautious about Muslim immigration to Great Britain, and spoke out with some concern about this — not because there was anything wrong with Islam, or that Islam can’t be integrated into British society. That’s not what he said. What he was concerned about was that their presence could be used as a kind of excuse for authoritarian crackdowns, for unscrupulous politicians to feed people’s irrational fears to create a kind of despotic response. To me, that’s a very interesting fact.”
“… a lot of times you don’t even need immigration to cause this paranoia. Just as an example, before Trump was talking about the problem of Mexican immigration into the US, all the polls showed a great deal of pro-immigrant sentiment in this country — and immigration had been declining for many years. If the US ever had an immigration “problem,” it would have been 30 years ago — it wasn’t three years ago. So Donald Trump was able to manufacture a kind of panic out of nothing, just by tapping into people’s fears. He kept saying: “We’ve got a problem, we’ve got a problem, we’ve got a problem,” and people listened to this and go: “Well, I didn’t know we had a problem, but he says we have problem. I guess we have a problem.”
“The older I’ve gotten the less I trust my political instincts on other people’s countries, because it can be very complicated. But I will tell you about the US’ case: Donald Trump has done some terrible things. He’s also done some very good things. They are happening at the same time.
Just as an example: last week, his head of the Federal Communications Commission rejected net neutrality, which was a kind of price control over the use of internet, so it was a deregulation measure. The same week his Justice Department refused a merger between Time Warner and AT&T, because Time Warner is the owner of CNN — he doesn’t like CNN, and he tries to punish a media that he doesn’t like, which is really an attack on free speech in the name of anti-trust. So one is good, one is terrible.
It’s a mix of things, and I think as liberals we need to be principled. We need to look at these cases and call them on a case-by-case basis.”
This is what Deirdre McCloskey says about the book:
“Jeffrey Tucker in his brilliant book calls right-wing populism what it actually is, namely, fascism, or, in its German form national socialism, nazism. You need Tucker’s book. You need to worry. If you are a real liberal, you need to know where the new national socialism comes from, the better to call it out and shame it back into the shadows. Now.”
Right Collectivism — The Other Threat to Liberty can be downloaded from Amazon for $3 or from the FEE site for free:
https://fee.org/resources/right-wing-collectivism/
https://www.amazon.com/Right-Wing-Collectivism-Other-Threat-Liberty-ebook/dp/B075MRH3W5