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I agree, good post. Hitler is not complicated.
Hitler's goal was to increase the strength of the German people by uniting them and conquering more land to settle. Land is the base of national strength. You need lots of good land if you want a large population and a strong country. He wanted this because Hitler conceptualized the world as a competition between nations, the state is a suit of armour for the nation. That's what identity politics is. It's the belief that politics is about using the state to strengthen and benefit one's people. It's about creating the biggest, toughest suit of armour that can brush aside any physical or psychic attack in a dangerous, bloody world. And you are allowed to strike first, if necessary.
This is totally against the concept that politics is about doing good in some universal sense, or leaving people alone.
The libertarian sees the state as a bikini that should only provide the bare minimum of protection, provide the maximum freedom of movement. They think that the world and other peoples are fundamentally good, the environment is pleasant and danger is rare. If you're on a tropical island why constrict yourself with clothing?
The moralist sees the state as a fashion statement, a social statement, a political message, it's about ensuring that the poor textile workers received a fair wage. Thus the state can be bound by international law, clothing is bound by fashion. The international community matters, those judging eyes are watching. Trendsetters should be followed. Getting one's hands dirty is to be avoided, you don't want to get blood on these jeans!
I think the Statist and Libertarian approaches are naive in opposite directions. Libertarians tend to be naive about people abusing the lack of control to exploit the weak. Statists tend to be naive about abuses of power.
So a libertarian wouldn’t worry too much about things like the power differential between an employer and employee, or between a strong person and a weak one. Or between a teacher and student. And they assume that no one would exploit a knowledge gap to make more money. So they don’t see a need for any government intervention in those things because employers would never exploit an employee’s desperation for a wage to get them to accept unsafe conditions or longer work hours. A pharmacist wouldn’t give you a substance they knew was addictive just to get a repeat buyer.
On the Statist side, they tend to assume that anyone in government is protected by magic good-guy dust and thus would never use their power to reward friends, punish enemies, or enrich themselves. They assume that no cop ever abuses power over a person he assumes is a criminal.
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I don't think this is true. I think libertarians tend to have a fairly negative view of humanity, as they think that people generally cannot be trusted with power, and that power itself almost inevitably leads to crimes and catastrophes. The Ron Swanson "everything before 1776 was a mistake" view of history is one of the most pessimistic views of man one can conceive of.
To a certain extent sure, but it's usually only very sheltered peoples that embrace libertarianism. The British avoided the need for a large standing army because of their geography. The US enjoyed the luxury of having no strong powers in their entire hemisphere. Neither power ever really suffered at the hands of any foreign forces like the less fortunately positioned countries.
If you tried libertarianism in central Europe or Asia, then you're in for some really bad experiences. Germany - 25% dead in the Thirty Years War. Unity is strength, be the hammer not the anvil. Poland -- annexed because they weren't strong and autocratic enough. Decisive, central leadership has its virtues. China - massive crises and disasters with tens of millions dead whenever the state shows weakness. Don't show any weakness.
What is the libertarian response to a bunch of bandits coming over the hill? There's more of them then there are of you. They're bandits, they're professional robbers and you're an amateur homestead defender. You need numbers, you need preparation, you need professionals, you need a state to fight them off. The only way to be without those things is if people are benign and don't decide to repress you in the first place. In fact the bandits could make their own state as stationary bandit. They become the nobles that own all the land that you pay taxes to, they provide protection. Either way you lose freedom if there are enough bad people.
Ackchyually, the hammer tends to break first.
All the blacksmithing demos I've ever seen have some serious ritual about how you are not supposed to hit the hammer on the anvil. Only with the workpiece between.
Of course, but misses happen.
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Well, this depends on how you define "libertarianism" and famously each libertarian has 3 - 5 competing definitions. I agree inasmuch as the ideology itself is a product of the modern age and makes modern assumptions, and by historical standards most all modern peoples are very sheltered. However if you look at people groups with libertarian characteristics (low state capacity, egalitarian attitudes, primacy of the individual or family, emphasis placed on individual rights) you tend to find the opposite – libertarian attitudes thrive in places like the Anglo-Scotch border region, the Comanche tribes of North America, I hear perhaps Somalia. These places are places of constant conflict, not sheltered places.
What time period do you have in mind here? The British were fairly consistently menaced by outside invasions (from Scotland, from France, from Spain, from various Viking invasions, etc.) and they raised huge armies (and ran up massive expenses) to deal with some of these threats.
Those regions produced libertarian thinkers like Frédéric Bastiat and of course most (in)famously Ayn Rand (idk are we counting Russia as European or Asian here?)
Germany is the heartland of the Anglo-Saxons (who, if memory serves, were noted in antiquity for their egalitarian attitudes) and (almost) the geographical home of the Austrian school of economics!
This also describes China whenever the state shows strength, does it not?
I agree with you that low state capacity (particularly after the Industrial revolution) is potentially a critical weakness in a society, but I would suggest you don't understand how this interfaces with the libertarian impulse. The libertarian impulse arises from a condition where self-reliant individualism is an adaptive capacity, not places where it is maladaptive, and I think historically it is often adaptive in frontier regions that are high in violence and low on population and trust.
Probably to airstrike them? In my experience libertarians are very often former military personnel and are better equipped both psychologically and otherwise to deal with a bunch of bandits coming over the hill than most people.
(An aside – , I can't speak as much for other places, but in the United States, the "bandits coming over the hill" (Indians) were often better dealt with by locals (for instance, the Meusebach-Comanche Treaty) or state forces (e.g. the Texas Rangers) than the strong arm of the centralized government, in this case the United States.)
More fundamentally, though, "bandits coming over the hill" is a quintessential example of a situation where libertarians are quite happy to look to the state. I don't think you understand the way (if I can speak broadly about an ideology or movement as prone to infighting as "libertarianism") that libertarians think about state capacity. Libertarians take a very Hobbesian view of the state (going back to a low view of human nature). For them, the state is fundamentally a killing machine that enjoys the monopoly on violence. Thus, they want the state to have capacity to deal with
None of this inherently implies any sort of weakness when it comes to military affairs. Libertarianism arguably is inadequate to 19th and 20th century industrialized warfare because internal state capacity translates to military prowess. But this is due to the intersection of culture and technology, and of course in World War Two the more libertarian regimes (the United States of America, the U.K.) were actually superior to regimes with ostensibly stronger state capacity like the USSR and Nazi Germany. There's nothing inherent in libertarian philosophy that requires a low state capacity for dealing with external threats, and I don't think the correlation between internal state capacity and wartime state capacity is quite as strong now as it was in the earlier days of the Industrial Revolution.
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I actually don't agree with this, and it is a central subject of my next planned post. The belief that politics is about "using the state to strengthen and benefit one's people" is what I would call the pagan view, but in my next post I will argue that Hitler was not a pagan. He doesn't want Germany to expand and flourish because they are his people, and he would not gracefully tolerate the same view from other tribes. Hitler wants Germany to expand, flourish, and conquer because they are the best people, in an absolute sense -- and that their flourishing and conquering at the expense of others is the only course in harmony with the one and only Natural Order.
That's fair. I suppose that's another way of looking at his Anglophilia. I see it as 'Germans and English are basically the same people, let's work together' but you could go 'the English are also a top-tier race (plus China/Japan), let's work together'.
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