Attack the System

by Keith Preston

  conspiracy theorists vs. NWO, CFR, TLC elites

  ethnic preservationists vs. totalitarian multiculturalists

  nationalists vs. internationalists

  states’ righters, localists vs. centralists

  hunters vs. middle class animal lovers

  animals vs. factory farming industry

  economic scapegoats (money launderers, bookies, loan sharks) vs. federal, state prosecutors

  anti-abortion protestors vs. Department of Justice, RICO statute.

  If indeed an insurgent libertarian-populist movement were able to put together a “coalition of coalitions” such as this, then we would de facto have the majority of the US population in our camp. Such a coalition would also splinter and neutralize the existing grassroots support coalitions maintained by the two rival wings of the ruling class, the neoconservatives and the cultural Marxists. In other words, victory would be ours. How will we get there from here? The present efforts by Kevin Zeese are an excellent model to draw on. Mr. Zeese is currently seeking the nomination of the Green, Libertarian, and Populist parties simultaneously in his bid for the Senate in Maryland. Zeese is running on a straightforward program of opposition to the Iraq war, salvaging the economy from ultimate ruin, opposing the PATRIOT Act, and ending the drug war. This might be a prototype for a radical future. Ultimately, we may at some point be able to combine the Green, Libertarian, Populist, Constitution, Natural Law, and other minor parties into a single party, organized in the manner I have thus far outlined. I would suggest calling such a party the “Federalist Party” for several reasons. First, there is a precedent for this from American history. Second, it accurately describes what the internal structure of the party should be. Third, it provides a model for the general types of institutional arrangements we should seek to develop. Perhaps our party flag could be an anarchist black flag with the snake from the “don’t tread on me” Gadsen battle flag embroidered on it.

  It is of the utmost importance that our rhetoric and propaganda resonate well with American history and political culture. We should not publicly call ourselves “anarchists,” “radicals,” or “revolutionaries.” Instead, we are “federalists,” “localists,” “constitutionalists,” “states’ righters,” “decentralists,” “libertarians,” “populists,” “Jeffersonians,” “democrats,” “patriots.” We advocate “economic justice,” “freedom,” “democracy,” “liberty,” “constitutional rights,” “decentralization,” “human rights,” “social justice,” “American ideals,” “self-reliance,” “the pioneer spirit.” Our icons are Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, Edmund Burke, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Robert La Follette, Jane Addams, Mark Twain, Charles Lindbergh, Samuel Gompers, Dorothy Day, Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Malcolm X, and Eugene McCarthy. It would be best if those of us who are to be the intellectual leadership of the insurgency remain in the background and attempt to avoid becoming public figures (if you are reading this, you are probably included in this category). We should avoid the “public eye” and calling unnecessary attention to ourselves. We need the freedom to be able to speak and write whatever we need to communicate without too much attention from the press or our enemies. We should seek to be Machiavelli rather than Lorenzo de’ Medici, Rasputin rather than Tsar Nicholas II, the privy counsel rather than the king. From our enemies’ perspective, we should be the subversives who whisper poison into the ears of princes.

  7. The Face of the Insurgency

  Thus far, much of what I have outlined follows a fairly conventional model of American political organization. Some anarchists will no doubt object that my approach reeks far too much of a reformist/electoralist outlook. While I certainly respect this point of view, I believe it is unnecessarily sectarian and archaic. The classical anarchists often advocated boycotting elections and for good reason. In most of the countries where the classical anarchist movement existed on a scale of any significance, the “right to vote” was either non-existent or the franchise was very limited. Even in nominal democracies like Switzerland and America, women and other large population groups were denied the vote. Even at that, many Spanish villages elected anarchist mayors and village councils in the years leading up to the civil war. I believe modern anarchists need to develop an approach to this question that is relevant to the nature of modern states and modern societies. The approach I favor is one of cold realism and pragmatism. It is indeed possible for ordinary people with conventional levels of resources to be elected to local and state offices in many parts of the United States. Persons who achieve some level of success in this area are then in a position to influence appointments to other positions of influence. This can be very important as a means of keeping the worst elements away from seats of power.

  The worst mistake that virtually all of the minor parties currently make is to waste millions of dollars in resources and thousands upon thousand of hours of labor on symbolic but utterly futile Presidential campaigns. If a coalition of minor parties could be united in the kind of confederation I have outlined, it would be best to develop a strategy of campaigning for positions that can actually be won and boycotting those where the odds are flagrantly stacked in favor of the establishment. A large minor party that campaigned, often successfully, for positions like city councils and county boards of supervisors, school boards, state representatives, local sheriffs, planning commissions, and (where feasible) governors and attorney generals, but openly boycotted presidential and senatorial elections and denounced them as fraudulent would have a propaganda field day. Meanwhile, we could gradually build up our influence at the local and regional levels, make common cause with local and regional secessionist movements, and work to pull the rug out from underneath the feds. I would suggest that the public faces of our movement should be familiar community activists, issue-oriented dissidents, or sympathetic celebrity candidates. We need plenty of Jesse Venturas of our own. An eighteen-year-old kid was elected mayor of a Minnesota town. Anti-police militant Tom Alciere was elected as a stealth candidate to the New Hampshire state legislature. A Republican delegate to the Arizona state legislature introduced a bill calling for secession by Arizona in the event of gun confiscation or the imposition of martial law. As mentioned, the intellectual leadership of the movement should remain in the background, primarily as strategists, advisors, and formulators of policy proposals.

  The achievement of victory by the kind of “coalition of coalitions” organized around anti-state, pro-class struggle issues of the type previously mentioned would mean the de facto abolition of the state. It is important to remember that all political systems contain a mixture of ideological currents and institutional models. All revolutions inevitably bring with them remnants of the previous system. It may well be that the victory of the anarchist movement in North America will take place inside the shell of the traditional constitutional system. That system has remained in place on the formal level for over two centuries even though the internal modus operandi has been altered radically a number of times. The US Presidency may continue to exist in the same manner as the British monarchy. Congress may well continue to exist on much weaker basis, akin to that of the European Parliament. Another possibility might be that the United States will split apart into a collection of smaller countries à la the former Soviet Union or the Ottoman Empire. We should be more concerned with substance than with form. Much more thought needs to be given to the kind of institutional framework that will be utilized following the victory of the anti-state movement. Examining the views of many of the anarchist sects on this question, I find many of their ideas and suggestions to be less than sufficient.

  The primary forms of political organization favored by most anarchists are either the New England town meeting “direct democracy” model of the Bookchinites, the “private defense agency” model of the Rothbardians or the industrial union model favored by most traditional anarcho-syndicalists. Each of these perspectives might have something to offer. “Direct democracy” is probably a
s good a model for the management of individual neighborhoods or county villages as any other. Private defense agencies could certainly be one method of crime control along with neighborhood watches, militias, posses, elected local constables, etc. The syndicalist model might be one means of industrial organization. However, each of these presents dangers of their own. The actual history of regimes organized on the “direct democracy” model is not exactly a happy one. It was this kind of system that executed Socrates and instigated the Salem witch trials. Likewise, “private defense agencies” often sound remarkably similar to traditional feudatories or warlord systems when described by their anarcho-capitalist proponents. Workers’ syndicates also bring with them the dangers of new kinds of monopolies and bureaucracies.

  One of the most important insights of the Machiavellians is that all human organizations of any size are oligarchies. There is no other. So the question is not whether or not there will be elites but rather what kind elites we will have. There seems to be two basic choices, either plutocracy (“rule of money”) or meritocracy (“rule of merit”). We should endorse the latter rather than the former. In the spirit of what Jack Ross calls the “Virginia radicals” of the Revolutionary War period, we should seek to cultivate an aristocratic populism that recognizes that the liberty of the leadership of the insurgent forces is dependent on that of the lowest commoners or most marginalized outcasts. Serious cultural, ethnic, or religious conflicts can be handled through decentralism, separatism, and mutual self-segregation. Aristotle noted that the Greek cities contained among themselves at least 158 separate and distinct constitutions. The Holy Roman Empire existed for centuries as a rather stable confederation of hundreds of largely sovereign kingdoms intermixed with thousands of independent territories or free cities. Likewise, the Swiss confederation has also existed for centuries with comparatively high levels of liberty, prosperity, and peace. Even today, there are political oddities around the world that might be prototypes for future anarchist institutional arrangements. The Israeli kibbutzim might be a model for anarcho-communists or, alternately, anarcho-racialists, Somalian kritarchy for anarcho-capitalists, the Mondragon worker cooperatives for anarcho-syndicalists, Liechtenstein for anarcho-monarchists, Amsterdam for anarcho-stoners, and Malta for anarcho-papists.

  As the nation-state system declines and the welfare-warfare states that have emerged over the past century are discredited, the core political task of the next wave of radical intellectuals will be the establishment of political arrangements that eventually replace the state as it is now understood. The dangers of concentrated power are now well-known and recognized. The inability of the plutocratic democracies that have come to dominate modern societies to effectively control power will be fully understood soon enough. The Greek cities, the Holy Roman Empire, traditional Swiss political culture, and contemporary micronations are all models to draw upon. We might first consider how the United States managed to begin as a federation of thirteen largely sovereign colonies along the Atlantic Coast and subsequently degenerate to the present level in barely two centuries. The Holy Roman Empire, the Icelandic Kingdom, and other pre-modern societies managed to maintain much higher levels of stability and consistency (not to mention limited government) over a longer period of time than that. The Swiss confederation has existed for seven centuries. Where did America get off track?

  I believe that the rapid degeneration of America since its founding is traceable to a number of sources. Some of these include obvious things like the unfortunate by-products of population growth, technological expansion, and general intellectual trends. However, there are two historically unique features of the American system that have led to its downfall. The first of these was America’s making her merchant class into the ruling class at the time of the founding. Most previous societies had been organized on the model of the Old Order, with the merchant class being subordinate to the landed aristocracy, the monarchy, and the Church. A look at the powers delegated to Congress by the US Constitution reveals that the American constitutional system was originally designed as a state-capitalist class dictatorship. These powers included those necessary for the advancement of the interests of capital, such as central banking, uniform bankruptcy laws, transportation subsidies, a large free trade area, and so on. Such a framework could only lead to the entrenchment of the plutocratic “monied interests” warned against by Jefferson. The early American leader Samuel Adams warned of the evils of plutocracy:

  If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

  If “capitalism” (or rule by the mercantile bourgeoisie) is one head of the dragon of Leviathan, then “democracy” is another. Originally, the United States was designed as an aristocratic republic on the model of Republican Rome. Neither the President nor the Senate were elected by popular vote and what little voting there was had been limited to a small portion of the general population. It was during the Jacksonian era of the early nineteenth century that Jacobin notions of “democracy” began to be imported into the United States from France. Indeed, the classical liberal Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville was alarmed by this trend and wrote about it in his classic Democracy in America. Specifically, Tocqueville warned about the dangers of the Provider State, a kind of soft totalitarianism that he could only speculate about in his time and one that Aldous Huxley would discuss much more thoroughly a century later. Even at the time of the American founding, Jefferson had warned of this danger:

  I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

  The problem with mass democracy is this: Politicians must obviously appeal to more and more constituent groups the more universal the franchise becomes. This in turn requires the radical expansion of the state in order to satisfy the demands for state assistance from all of these groups and the creation of massive bureaucracies in order to manage the distribution of state favors. In other words, mass democracy must by nature be totalitarian and, indeed, even the most “liberal” democracies of today are totalitarian by historic standards.

  There is an even greater danger than the bureaucratic regimentation of daily life inherent in the nature of modern capitalist democracies. The core values of these states are those of egalitarianism, consumerism, and therapeutism (as opposed to merit, frugality, and responsibility). It is considered the sacred duty of the state to provide everyone with “equal rights” and not only the pursuit of happiness but happiness itself. Theoretically, this is to be done through a generalized ethos of materialism and consumption to the point of gluttony, endless psychological conditioning techniques, and a Nanny State resolved to protect everyone from falling into “unhappiness” as a result of poverty, illness, racism, sexism, or drug addiction. In other words, modern “democratic capitalism” is nothing more than the Provider State warned against by Tocqueville or, more specifically, Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Even prior to the Second World War, perceptive thinkers like Huxley and George Orwell understood the menacing nature of the culture of materialism and false egalitarianism then developing in America. Martin Heidegger argued that the universal triumph of such a system would be the “night of the world” or a new dark ages. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn warned that egalitarianism can only breed mediocrity for egalitarianism does not raise the inferior to the level of the superior but only reduces the superior to the level of the inferior. Herbert Spencer understood that “to shield people from their own folly,” the central purpose of the Nanny State, “is to populate the world with fools.” Nietzsche insisted that a civilization whose principle purpose was the pursuit of comfort and the avoidance of danger would that of the “Last Man,” a prelude to complete barbarism generated by decay and mediocrity.
As I have said elsewhere:

  The nations of the West are driven by an almost as fanatical devotion to Mammon, that is, to wealth, luxury, power, pleasure and privilege. Further, the culture of the West combines this unabashedly materialist ethos with rejection of strength and discipline in favor of a maternalistic emphasis on health, safety, “sensitivity,” “self-esteem,” “potential,” “personal growth,” “getting in touch with one’s inner child,” “feelings” and other concepts common to pop culture psychobabble. Of course, the socio-cultural ramifications of this are to create a society of weaklings, mediocrities and crybabies.

  Indeed, it is in those nations where this kind of system is the most well-established and long-established that the process of decay is the most advanced. And yet it is precisely this kind of system that America wishes to export to the rest of the world. Fortunately, this will prove to be a failed ambition. An empire whose ideology is a combination of advertising slogans, psychobabble, and silly pseudo-humanitarian platitudes (presumably enforced by tanks and air strikes), and whose subjects pledge allegiance to nothing other than their credit cards, convenience, “sensitivity” (for themselves but not for anyone else), the latest celebrity gossip, and the latest model cell phone, is not really an empire that is suited for world domination for very long. The ancient cultures of Asia and the Near East are once again asserting themselves. Nietzsche insisted that the warrior ethos was essential to the survival of civilization. I was in Europe when the present war in Iraq began in March of 2003. Watching coverage of the war on International CNN in the lounge of my Amsterdam hotel, I observed the militancy and zealotry of the Iraqi militiamen and contrasted their warrior spirit with that of the American soldiers being transported into battle. Most of the Americans looked like what they were: a bunch of scared shitless, barely-out-of-high-school kids wondering, “How the fuck did I get here?” There was no doubt in my mind who would win this war.