Many people were shocked to see the identitarian left erupting in ghoulish celebration when news broke that Charlie Kirk had been assassinated. Students who despised Kirk’s political views were seen chanting, “We got Charlie in the neck.” The British sociologist Frank Furedi argues that these students are not confined to a radical unhinged fringe, nor do they merely represent “the acts of a few morons” as many people suppose.
Rather, the celebrations reflect a broader “fetish of savagery” on the left, driven by academic theories that treat violence as “an act of self-care” for members of venerated identity groups. Furedi warns that, “reactions such as these are not merely the actions of a few infantile or radicalised individuals, it is baked into the modern Leftist world-view.” The left has become so preoccupied with its own sense of moral fervor that today “leftism – especially in its identitarian, post-colonial form – is an explicitly violent ideology.” It regards violence as a “cleansing force” that will help it to purge the wrongs of colonialism, capitalism, and all forms of historical injustice against which modern academics rail. Furedi explains:
They have internalised the sensibility of victimisation, and from this identitarian perspective the so-called victims of the system are thought thoroughly justified in embracing the politics of violence. Just look at their response to the callous cruelty of Kirk’s murder, and observe how the conservative activist has been cast into the role of a non-person and how others are fair game to be targeted.
As the ideological standard bearers of the left descend into openly endorsing the death of their opponents and the destruction of what they see as an oppressive civilization, it becomes increasingly difficult for libertarians to defend the doctrine of individual liberty without being cast into the same ideological camp as the identitarians. The individualism of the “me, me, me” left has helped to drive the poisonous identitarian philosophy in which “misgendering is violence,” “racism is violence,” and “silence is violence.”
The term “individualism” has in any case always been viewed with wariness by conservatives, due to its overtones implying selfishness and hubris, and its seeming disregard for social norms and traditional values, and this only gets worse when the self-obsessed left endorse violence against anyone they perceive as conservative. In this context, defending individual liberty seems to many conservative observers to be nothing short of suicidal, as it seems to require them to “tolerate” the values and lifestyles of the communists whose goal is to destroy Western civilization. Some conservatives are already expressing doubts as to the value of protecting free speech when it extends to the free speech of the ghouls rejoicing in Kirk’s assassination.
The fact that the notion of individualism is now tarnished by its associations with selfish and violent identitarian groups therefore poses a challenge for modern libertarianism, especially since individual liberty with its doctrines of free speech and freedom from state control lie at the heart of the libertarian creed. In his 1971 New York Times op-ed “The New Libertarian Creed,” Murray Rothbard characterized libertarianism as “the tradition that once established America as the proud beacon-light of freedom, the tradition of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson and Garrison.” The byline read, “A renewed faith in the individual is the basis of the new doctrine.”
He depicted this focus on individual liberty as “a burgeoning split in the right wing” as neo-conservatives grew increasingly preoccupied with “militarism and empire.” Today, the split in the right wing is growing even deeper, as nationalist conservatives launch a campaign to impose “consequences” on their ghoulish opponents by getting them fired from their jobs. In this context they have little patience for the doctrines of individual liberty.
Rothbard concluded his “New Libertarian Creed” with an important point which may help to explain why the notion of individual liberty has gone so disastrously astray—he explained that the goal of libertarianism was “raising the standards of freedom and reason on which this country was founded.” His emphasis on the individual’s right to self-ownership was explicitly linked to these foundational standards. When individual liberty departs from reason it becomes grotesque, a sinister parody of itself, and fuels the deadly notion that violence is justified if anyone feels his individuality is being “disrespected” by his ideological opponents. This is now the hallmark of the identitarian left—that failing to respect their stated pronouns, or failing to respect their legacies of oppression and pay them their “reparations,” amounts to “erasing” them and thereby justifies them in being violent.
History reveals this problem to have deep roots. William Lloyd Garrison—who was admired by Rothbard for his commitment to abolitionism—was also violently attacked by mobs who were outraged by his declaration that the Constitution was “the most bloody and heaven-daring arrangement ever made by men for the continuance and protection of a system of the most atrocious villainy ever exhibited on earth,” namely, slavery. Garrison’s denunciation of the constitution was deemed to be outrageous as it challenged the belief that America is a nation founded on the ideal of liberty. Hence, the abolitionists were often subjected to violent attacks. But many abolitionists, for their part, also embraced aggressive violence as a justified means of advancing their cause. John Brown—who committed cold blooded murder in the cause of abolitionism—was funded by New England liberal intellectuals, one of whom was a friend of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. They believed violence against the Southern states was necessary to promote the cause of justice.
Even the pacifist libertarian Lysander Spooner, in his 1858 pamphlet, “A Plan for the Abolition of Slavery, and To the Non-Slaveholders of the South,” defended the right of slaves to seize the property of their masters “by stratagem or force.” Today’s social justice warriors—schooled in critical race theories which treat “slavery” as synonymous with “racism”—believe that the violence of the abolitionist cause applies with equal justification to the enforcement of their own anti-racist ideals.
It is clear from these historical examples that violence permeating the cause of liberty is nothing new. But, as Rothbard explains in the Ethics of Liberty, violence is only justified in self-defense. Confusion has arisen because the boundary between aggression and defense has become blurred by convoluted identitarian theories in which violent mobs all believe themselves to be fighting “defense” against aggressors. As they see it, if violence is only justified in self-defense, that is their cue to don the mantle of social justice warriors fighting defense against tyranny, ignoring the fact that they are the ones committing aggressive acts against others. This problem of violence applies to all identity groups who believe they are fighting for the right to “live as who they are” and the right to bring “their real self” wherever they go. They want to be seen, heard, affirmed, celebrated, and even worshipped by everyone who has the misfortune to cross their path—or else.
Libertarians would agree that each person has a right to self-ownership, to live his life as he wishes without interference from the government or anyone else. As Rothbard put it, “Every individual as an independent acting entity possesses the absolute right of ‘self-ownership’; that is, to own his or her person without molestation by others.”
But problems begin when identitarians, many of whom identify as liberals or left-libertarians and claim to uphold individual liberty, forget that the right not to be molested by others also entails the duty not to molest others. They aggressively demand to have their individuality “respected” and issue edicts and ultimatums as to what they require from others as a mark of respect, on pain of violent consequences for non-compliance. It is difficult to think of a more perverse departure from “the standards of freedom and reason on which this country was founded” than a culture of individualism rooted in violence against one’s ideological opponents.