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The courage posts are back.

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I put The Willow Branch back on Kindle Select as an experiment. I read somewhere that around 4-5 books, you can leverage single free days to sell more books. Now that Objects in View is on pre-order, I thought I would give it a try.

From time to time over the next two months, The Willow Branch will be free for a single day. It’s first free day was Monday. I gave away 24 books, but I sold one. I found that kind of interesting. The free day must have propelled the book into a ranking where it got some attention.

I didn’t advertise because I got busy and forgot about it, but I’ll set up some auto ads for coming free days.

I intend to track what happens and see if it is worth it.

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Most indie writers don’t have a lot of time to write. We have to work other jobs to pay the bills, after all. Even when I was a stay-at-home mother, I had this other job that required I change her dirty diapers and feed her.There is never enough time to practice your art. You are forever battling against the many demands life puts on the precious hours in your day,

Ray Bradbury reported that he enjoyed writing amid the chaos of his family and, frankly, I agree with Mr. Bradbury. For a while, my writing cave was a spare bedroom away from the family and, frankly, I didn’t like it. I write in snippets and have a high tolerance for noise, so the living room or the master bedroom where the kids were yelling outside in the hall worked fine for me … and still does.

I honestly don’t know what I would do with 24/7 time to write. I suspect I would waste a great deal of it in other activities. And I would lose connections with the world that I value greatly. My jobs have been a great source of inspiration and research for me over the years.

Someone at the local writer’s guild asked me how I get into the zone for writing when I have distractions that she, being a non-working empty nester whose husband is gone on military deployment does not have. I stared at her, dumbfounded. She’s reading my fantasy series and marveling that I can get into the headspace some writers call “flow”. I’m glad I didn’t really have any answer for her, because I think what I’m about to say now may sound a litlte arrogant to other writers.

 

Certainly I carve out time where I can surrender all of my attention to the creative task for hours at a time, but more often than not, I am surrendering my attention for minutes. To surrender myself totally to the creative process requires a deliberate throwing of a switch inside my brain, but it is a switch that I have been aware of since high school. It allows me to slip into a state where I am not so much working on my art, but breathing my art. For me, it’s really not that tough to create instantaneous headspace in the midst of a busy day. I pre-write a lot of scenes while doing mundane tasks like reconciling credit card charges for my office. I don’t wait around for a muse to inspire me. The muse is almost always there, taking in my head and it is in that headspace where beautiful things happen. When I put my fingers to the keyboard, I am often just transcribing the story that has already played out in my head.

 

How do you create headspace? Well, I find it just comes to me when I’m thinking about something else, but I’ve had friends tell me that they think about nothing. That wouldn’t work for me, I don’t think. My brain would distract itself with all the wonderful things there are to think about, so it’s better that I’m thinking about something that doesn’t require a lot of thought. I give myself permission to step outside of my life — to unfocus just slightful from whatever tedious task I have chosen for myself. I allow myself to think someone else’s thoughts, to become someone else.

 

There is nothing wrong with setting aside time for this if you can manage it, but my life has never arranged itself thusly, so I don’t allow it to dictate my creativity. I take frequent breaks. I switch between stories. I go hiking. There is a natural ebb and flow to creativity. You can’t run the well dry, but you can sap its energy if you push too hard and too long on one particular story. That leads to burn out and I suspect is the source of the writer’s block I’ve never experienced. When I get stuck, feeling uninspired, I switch to another story and work on that for a while. I give myself a break, a momentary step back from my primary project and purposefully go do anything else.

When I get into rewrite, I do set aside time to actually get into deep concentration on the project, to envision scenery and action sequences. Sometimes that feels awkward, so I have to go through the motions, writing one word after another after another, until the creativity starts to flow.

The one thing I never do is allow myself to be freaked out when I feel less than inspired. The characters inside my head will almost always speak to me again in the future — if I’m patient and filing documents, because that is how my writer’s brain works.

 

 

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Today’s interview is with James Howard Kunstler. Welcome to the blog. You and I have some semi-similar backgrounds … we were both journalists when we were young. Tell us something about yourself.

I was born and raised in Manhattan, except for a three-year interval in the Long Island suburbs between age 5 and 8. Went to the High School of Music and Art, where my poor academic record made it hard for me to get into college. Because the Vietnam War was on (and the military draft), I managed at the last minute to wiggle into a third-rate SUNY school (Brockport State) in the remotest corner of far western New York. Had a pretty good time there. Majored in theatre (show biz!) Liked being far away from the Big City! Liked small town life. After college, worked for the Boston hippie newspapers, then several daily newspapers as a so-called feature writer. Got hired by Rolling Stone Magazine in 1974 — then located in San Francisco — and worked as an editor / staff writer in the music section 1974-5. Didn’t like the job (stuck in an office, unlike my freewheeling days on a metro daily). Wasn’t happy living in San Francisco. Dropped out. Rode my motorcycle back east and settled in Saratoga Springs, upstate New York, a small-town antidote to my Manhattan childhood. Commenced writing novels. Published eight books and was still waiting on tables for walking around money. Then wrote a non-fiction book about the fiasco of Suburbia — The Geography of Nowhere.  My writing career got some traction. Started getting better advances on my books and did a lot of public speaking and lectures on urban design, a good revenue stream that allowed me to live a bit better. Eventually wrote The Long Emergency, a much broader disquisition on the discontents of Modernity and the converging catastrophes of contemporary life (energy and other resource scarcities, geopolitical upheaval, climate change, etc.). I have been fortunate to not have to teach in college — a deadly fate — though I have worked plenty of shitty jobs until my 40s. I was also fortunate in having settled where I did: Saratoga Springs in the late 20^th century was a great place to be a starving bohemian. I lived in really nice apartments that were cheap. I had ready access to beautiful countryside. And I developed a nourishing social network… all in one of the rare, healthy Main Street towns of America… life at an agreeable scale! After over thirty years there, and about 16 books, I moved 15 miles east across the Hudson River to the edge of a smaller town, Greenwich, New York, in order to make a little homestead with gardens, fruit trees, and chickens… where I remain. I was married and divorced three times — not proud of it, but there it is — with no children. I lead an orderly, happy life, spend my free time gardening, hiking, painting (oils on canvas), and playing fiddle with a local contradance band.

 

At what point did you know you wanted to be a writer? 

JHK — My stepfather (a nice man) was a magazine editor and he encouraged me to write. As a teenager, I turned out poems and short stories. In college I was somewhat distracted by my activities as a theatre major — though I really liked directing plays! I got a job directing for a summer stock theatre right out of college, but it ended badly when the operation ran out money and stopped paying us… the night of my tech rehearsal (setting lights) for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So I chucked that career path and set off for Boston to write for the hippie newspapers of the day. My stepfather knew a guy who ran The Boston Phoenix and he gave me a tryout. I was very earnest about it. I learned how to do the legwork of reporting and turned out a lot of interesting long-form articles. Boston / Cambridge at that time (1972) was a heavy radical politics scene. Since I regarded radical politics as idiotic, I focused my writing on Boston the Boston underbelly and its lowlife: mafia hit men, loan sharks, private detectives, various crazy people, transvestite caberet performers, charter fishermen…. I had my own little realm of non-political material. After that, I started working for legit daily papers… and, as stated above, finally dropped out at age 25 to write books.

 

Tell us about your writing process.

I have followed Flaubert’s dictum (I paraphrase): If you want to be wild in your art, be bourgeois in your habits. Except for the uproars of divorce, my life has generally been very orderly, though my composition method changed as I moved from typewriter and legal pads to computers. In the pre-computer days, I got right to work around 9:30 in the morning after answering the mail. I didn’t write on weekends. Never have. For years, around noon, I swam a mile a day at the Saratoga YMCA pool. For 25 years I also ran four miles a day later in the afternoon. I often had restaurant jobs in those days (between book advances) and I might have to report to work at five o’clock in the afternoon. I never suffered from “writer’s block,” though the work was sometimes heavy lifting. In the old days (typewriter) I wrote many drafts of a book, since it was physically impossible to do much cutting-and-pasting with that “liquid paper” stuff you painted over sentences with. With computer writing, I produce a bit less each day (average 750 words), but it comes out more polished. Basically, it’s one initial polished draft and then a quick run-through of the finished manuscript. I write in dramatic sequence. I only outline a scene or two ahead. I have been very fortunate to learn how to enter the mental state known as “flow” — full creative engagement. I have also been fortunate to be able to rely on my instincts and imagination — to develop real confidence in what I am doing. I have published more books in my 60s than any previous period of my life.

 

 

What is your favorite genre … to read … to write?

I read broadly, novels, non-fiction, biographies, tool manuals. My own non-fiction books required a lot of research… directed reading that can get tedious, a necessary pain-in-the-ass. In fiction, of course, you don’t have to be correct, only plausible, so fiction is more sheer fun to write. But I get a lot of pleasure from any kind of composition. As a polemical controversialist, I try to be deliberately provocative and I like to get cute with language. My weekly blog of the past 15 years (Clusterfuck Nation at www.kunstler.com) especially affords me rich opportunities for colourful, bravura commentary. My style there has become increasingly baroque and complex. I am also overtly comical, even in very serious books like The Long Emergency. Interestingly, the reviewers never noticed that my books were funny. Now that the reviewing industry is dead, nobody notices anything.

 

 

I’ve noticed. What are you passionate about?

Political and economic affairs, art generally, my own painting in particular, cooking, gardening, physical activity, women. I probably have more and better women friends than men.

 

The opposite sex is fascinating. They think so differently than I do. What is something you cannot live without?

 

You’d be surprised what you can live without. Probably everything except food and water. It’s more a matter of how you spend your time and what you pay attention to. There is joy to be found in many places and many ways, though it usually requires an effort. Even sex requires some effort, right?  I believe in making things happen and getting things done. All this requires serious self-discipline.

 

 

When you are not writing, what do you do?

Get exercise, practice the fiddle, get out and paint sur le motif, throw dinner parties, read, watch ballgames occasionally, ride my bike (while listening to podcasts).

 

 

 

Have you written any books that made a transformative effect on you? If so, in what way?

My first non-fiction book was transformative in as much I was then taken seriously as a social commentator… plus, I was invited to give talks and lectures at all sorts of venues (universities, conferences and symposia), which brought me back to my old performance skills developed on the college stage. I was good at it. I would have been a good demagogue… but the other chores of politics are too tedious and asinine. Anyway, the success of that book allowed me to write a lot more serious non-fiction and become a commentator of the contemporary scene, with an audience.

 

Where do you get the inspiration for your novels?

My novels have all been very different in both style and content. In my younger days, I was going for bravura performance. I wanted to be noticed. So, for instance, I cooked up a meta-fiction like An Embarrassment of Riches, my 1983 tale set in 1805 about two bumbling botanists sent by Thomas Jefferson on a fool’s errand into the southern wilderness… narrated in the period voice of the 19-year-old main character. It was a wild story, full of improbable and entertaining buffooneries. It was also a commercial flop — but that having more to do with the publisher (an imprint of Doubleday) going bust the year it was published. In fact, Doubleday took over its publication and did a lousy job. It was what they call an “orphan” book — having lost its editor, a person interested in guiding it onto the market. Anyway, I was inspired to write that by reading the annals of James J Audubon, Lewis and Clark, Alexander Wilson, William Bartram, and other great American “naturalists,” as they were called. At the time, I was heavily into the fly-fishing scene here in upstate New York, and spent a lot of time out in the natural world observing birds, insects, fish, plants. For another example: my 2004 novel Maggie Darling, A Modern Romance. I wanted to write a women’s novel. The book was a roman a clef about the public figure known as Martha Stewart, the media goddess of hearth home, an archetypal persona. I liked the challenge of writing a so-called women’s novel. I may not be the best judge, but I consider it one of my best writing performances. That book was also a flop, for the weird reason that my publisher sometimes socialized with Martha Stewart and, after acquiring the novel, lost his nerve in publicizing it effectively. My World Made By Hand novels (a series of four), set in a post economic crash American future, were inspired by the wish to depict the aftermath of The Long Emergency in a vivid way that would get to people through their senses and emotions. At the moment I am more than halfway through a novel set on a hippie commune in 1968, narrated by a 19-year-old girl. I’m very happy with it. I was inspired in a flash on a drive through a particularly remote corner of southern Vermont, when I went through a ghost town. The story virtually came to me in the 60-odd seconds it took me to drive through the nearly deserted village.

 

What sort of research do you do for your novels?

Not much for novels. I make shit up — though, as stated above, my preliminary reading sometimes provokes me to construct a fictional world. These days, with the internet, it is fantastically easy to look shit up when you need to. On Maggie Darling, the fact-checker at my publisher got very upset when, after looking up all kinds of things in the book, she couldn’t corroborate the existence of anything — I’d made up everything: the names of clothing designers, brands of things… umbrellas, flatware, cosmetics, you name it.

 

So you’re avoiding copyright infringement. Sounds good to me, but then I’m a novelist too. If someone who hasn’t read any of your novels asked you to describe your writing, what would you say?

It has a broad range, stylistic elegance and panache, and is studded with comedy.

 

Do you have a special place where you write?

Mostly I report to a regular desk with a computer on top, and mostly have through all my career — except I wrote much of the second World Made By Hand novel — The Witch of Hebron — on a laptop in a coffee shop in Saratoga. That laptop died and I haven’t replaced it… the iPad tablet is a pain-in-the-ass to write on… and the little town I live in now doesn’t have a coffee shop. But it’s okay. I still engage in the task here at the home office… I still enter the flow state….

 

 

 

I like that state. Do you find yourself returning to any recurring themes within your writing and, if so, are you any closer to finding an answer?

 

Well, obviously I returned to the theme of The Long Emergency four times in my World Made By Hand books. But the subject of the future of civilization, of the human project, shall we say, was pretty fucking compelling. Otherwise, I have ranged around. I did write three books about urbanism-and-architecture — the human habitat — because the everyday world of America is such a goddam mess: the suburban wilderness we’ve created. It’s one of the things most responsible for the discontent of contemporary life, and fixing it is one of the enormous projects we face. I am still hugely interested in that issue, and still lecture on it here and there — though the social justice uproars on campus in the last few years have made the college scene uncongenial for controversialists such as myself. The little darlings don’t want to hear disturbing ideas. That’s a whole other discussion, but it’s a fucking disaster for intellectual life in this country.

 

 

Couldn’t agree with you more about the PC murder of discussion. Are you a plot driven or character driven writer? Why?

 

Character driven, because if you create credible persons on the page, they will instruct you how they behave in a given situation, and plot is behavior.

 

 

Absolutely! Do you write from an outline or are you a discovery writer?  Why?

 

Fiction is a self-informing process. The first sentence will inform you what the next sentence is, and the first paragraph the second, and so forth. Confidence in this process is the key to my ability to construct these works. I am often surprised at how things actually turn out. But I am even more amazed at how things manage to come together at the end. My method in the World Made By Hand novels, which involved a very large cast of characters, required the weaving of multiple sub-plots in each book. I was kind of astounded that they all worked out, like the resolution of a symphony. I had a kind of religious faith in the process. You allow things to unfold, to flower. You are just a medium to bring this into being.

 

What point of view do you prefer to write, and why?

I’ve employed both first person and third person narrative successfully. The catch with first person is that the narrator has to be present in all the dramatic scenes – where things actually happen… the action! — whereas third person is much more flexible. But there are reasons for both, especially if it matters to develop a distinctive voice for the narration.

 

Do you head-hop?

If you mean skip ahead in the story, no, never. I roll it out as it plays.

 

 

 

I’m going to drop you in a remote Alaska cabin for a month. It’s summer so you don’t have worry about freezing to death. I’ll supply the food and the mosquito spray. What do you do while you’re there and what do you bring with you? If you’re bringing books, what are they?

 

I actually wrote much of my 2003 book, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, in a remote Adirondack cabin on a lake, accessible only by boat. I wrote it on one of those pre-tablet, pre-iPad, hand-held mini-computers, a Psion, with a teeny-weeny keyboard, running on two AA cell batteries. I managed to get comfortable with it. I even built a little wooden lap-desk to work on it. I sat up on a bed writing much of the book, surrounded by a dozen open reference and research books on cities on the bed. There was no internet up there. You could boot the file from the Psion into your desktop with a cable once you got home. That summer was especially rainy, so my memory of the experience was of sitting cozily on a bed under a quilt happily typing away on this tiny machine. I regard the book as one of my best.

 

 

So you would make good use of the cabin. Talk about your books individually.

 

I pretty much have already. Perhaps the only interesting story is that my then-agent refused to sell The Long Emergency in 2003. He thought it was too depressing. I had to fire him, and I couldn’t land another agent. The others I approached wrinkled their noses at it. So I sent it out to two of the few big-time editors I actually knew. Both of them were interested, but one of them got pissed off when I told him it was a multiple submission — which, at the time, was one of the great no-no’s of publishing. Anyway, I sold it to the other guy and then made him eat my still unsold novel Maggie Darling, too, for a two-book contract. The Long Emergency turned out to be my best-selling book to date.

 

 

Was it your intention to write a story with a message or a moral?
The messages in my non-fiction books were self-evident: e.g. the shitty-ness of the American built environment (and the better way to construct towns)… the perils of late-stage industrialism, etc. Of my novels, only in the World Made By Hand series was there an overt message. My not-so-hidden agenda was to depict a post-industrial world that was actually a very charming place, despite its hardships, so that people wouldn’t fear the direction we were heading in.

 

 

What do you want readers to think or feel after reading one of your books?

 

That it was worth reading. That they were entertained and/or edified by it. That it gave them some pleasure, perhaps some direction, and a few laughs.

 

 

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This week I am interviewing someone I stalked. I heard about his books on another website and thought “I want to interview this fellow” and so I reached out and asked him to answer my questions. Tomorrow, you’ll find out who.

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Has anyone noticed that Obamacare appears to be failing?

I know! Absolutely no one could have seen that coming and so nobody predicted it. Right?

Insurance companies are dropping out of the ACA’s exchanges. Pretty much weekly, Insurers are announcing that they are trimming or eliminating their Obamacare coverage in more and more states. Alaska is one of those. The companies explain that healthy individuals are not buying insurance under Obamacare as expected, thus triggering a corporate death spiral.

If you have a memory, and I do, you remember that John Robert’s opinion for the Supreme Court last year was supposedly meant to save the ACA from a death spiral by ruling that the individual mandate applies in every state, regardless of whether it is for a state exchange or the federal exchange. So what happened?

In the sausage factory that created the ACA, there were a modest number of exemptions allowed, one of which is a huge backdoor.

 

Fast-forward to today, just a little over one year later.  Insurers are announcing on practically a weekly basis that they are trimming or even eliminating their Obamacare coverage in more and more states.  They give as the reason that healthy individuals are not buying insurance under Obamacare as expected, thus triggering a death spiral.  Wait!  What?  Didn’t the Supreme Court protect Obamacare against a death spiral by deciding, as the president argued, that the individual mandate applies in every state, regardless of whether it has a state exchange or the federal exchange?  What is happening?

In the sausage factory that produced the ACA several categories were exempted from the individual mandate and one category is a huge escape hatch: “any applicable individual who for any month is determined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services … to have suffered a hardship with respect to capability to obtain coverage under a qualified health plan.”  It’s a “hardship” exemption.

The Obama administration then took it upon themselves to define “hardship” in such expansive language that huge swathes of the population are exempt from the individual mandate.  Yup! You can’t make this crap up. After pleading before the Supreme Court to make sure that the individual mandate applies nationwide, arguing that it would prevent a death spiral, the administration has triggered a death spiral by issuing regulations exempting 10s of millions from the individual mandate.

For 2015, the list of exemptions invented by the bureaucrats and said to represent “hardship” relieving the individual from the individual mandate includes:

– homelessness,
– eviction within the past six months,
– facing eviction or foreclosure (even if not evicted yet),
– received a shutoff notice from a utility company,
– experienced domestic violence,
– death of a close family member,
– fire or flood or other disaster that caused substantial damage to your property whether natural or man-made,
– filed for bankruptcy within the past six months,
– medical expenses within the last 24 months that you couldn’t afford to pay,
– unexpected increases in expenses due to caring for a family member who was ill, disabled or aging,
– a child has no medical coverage because some other person is responsible (by court order) but has not paid,
– ineligibility for Medicaid because your state did not expand eligibility under Obamacare, or
– your individual insurance plan was cancelled and you believe other marketplace plans are unaffordable.

If … somehow … one of those categories doesn’t cover your particular exemption situation, the regulations allow you to make up your own category. Yeah, that’s right. Any other hardship that prevented someone from obtaining health insurance will be reviewed and accepted as necessary.

The effect of the hardship exemption has been to eliminate any financial pressure on millions of individuals to buy health insurance under the ACA. The Congressional Budget Office issued a report in June of 2014 that said:

30 million non-elderly residents will be uninsured in 2016 but … 23 million uninsured people in 2016 will qualify for one or more of those exemptions.  Of the remaining 7 million uninsured people, CBO and JCT estimate that some will be granted exemptions from the penalty because of hardship or other reasons[.] …  All told, CBO and JCT estimate that [only] about 4 million people [out of the 30 million uninsured] will pay a penalty because they are uninsured in 2016.

In other words, about 90% of the national’s 30 million uninsured won’t pay a penalty under the Affordable Care Act in 2016 because of a growing number of exemptions to the health-coverage requirements.

So, is Obama and his administration just incompetant or are they master manipulators? They got the decision they wanted from the Supreme Court by conjuring the specter of a death spiral, then directed the issuance of regulations shielding almost all of the uninsured from the individual mandate, thus guaranteeing the very death spiral that they warned against before the Supreme Court.  Now, as insurers are announcing their departure from Obamacare due to lack of participation by healthy individuals, Obama is leaving the White House, so it’ll be someone else’s problem.

If it weren’t for the fact that this thing is tangled through the economy like a brain aneurysm, I’d be preparing my cheer outfit for when the time bomb goes off. It doesn’t really matter who is holding it when it goes “boom”. Hillary Clinton richly deserves it and Trump has been a great booster for this disaster too. Maybe Gary Johnson would like to step out of the race now before he gets any of the fecal matter on him.

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Source: Even progressives in the media are stifling amazement at the chutzpah of Hillary Clinton in refusing to allow open questioning by members of the media at a press conference. Anyone with common sense understands that this is a disqualifier for the pre…

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To the cheers of alt-righters everywhere, those angry lords of the green frog meme who hurl edgy un-PC insults at everyone to their left, the Democratic nominee has put them on the map at long last.

Found on FEE – Source: Five Differences Between the Alt-Right and Libertarianism | Jeffrey A. Tucker

Well, Hillary Clinton has gone and done it.

To the cheers of alt-righters everywhere, those angry lords of the green frog meme who hurl edgy un-PC insults at everyone to their left, the Democratic nominee has put them on the map at long last. Specifically, she accused Donald Trump of encouraging and giving voice to their dark and dangerous worldview.

Let’s leave aside the question of whether we are talking about an emergent brown-shirted takeover of American political culture, or perhaps merely a few thousand sock-puppet social media accounts adept at mischievous trolling on Twitter. The key issue is that more than a few alt-rightists claim some relationship to libertarianism, at least at their intellectual dawning until they begin to shed their libertarianism later on.

What are the differences in outlook between alt-right ideology and libertarianism?

1. The Driving Force of History

Every ideology has a theory of history, some sense of a driving theme that causes episodic movements from one stage to another. Such a theory helps us make sense of the past, present, and future. The libertarian theme of history is beautifully articulated by Murray Rothbard:

My own basic perspective on the history of man…is to place central importance on the great conflict which is eternally waged between Liberty and Power… I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity. Out of liberty, then, stem the glories of civilized life.

There it is: liberty vs. power. Liberty unleashes human energy and builds civilization. Anything that interferes with the progress of liberty impedes the progress of humanity. One crowds out the other. The political (or anti-political) goal is clear: diminish power (which means reducing unjust violence) and enhance liberty.

Frédéric Bastiat described the free society as characterized by a “harmony of interests.”What is the alt-right theory of history? The movement inherits a long and dreary tradition of thought from Friedrich Hegel to Thomas Carlyle to Oswald Spengler to Madison Grantto Othmar Spann to Giovanni Gentile to Trump’s speeches. This tradition sees something else going on in history: not liberty vs. power, but something like a more meta struggle that concerns impersonal collectives of tribe, race, community, great men, and so on.

Whereas libertarianism speaks of individual choice, alt-right theory draws attention to collectives on the move. It imagines that despite appearances, we all default in our thinking back to some more fundamental instinct about our identity as a people, which is either being shored up by a more intense consciousness or eroded by a deracination and dispossession from what defines us. To criticize this as racist is often true but superficial. What’s really going on here is the depersonalization of history itself: the principle that we are all being buffeted about by Olympian historical forces beyond our control as mere individuals. It takes something mighty and ominous like a great leader, an embodiment of one of these great forces, to make a dent in history’s narrative.

2. Harmony vs. Conflict

A related issue concerns our capacity to get along with each other. Frédéric Bastiat described the free society as characterized by a “harmony of interests.” In order to overcome the state of nature, we gradually discover the capacity to find value in each other. The division of labor is the great fact of human community: the labor of each of us becomes more productive in cooperation with others, and this is even, or rather especially, true given the unequal distribution of talents, intelligence, and skills, and differences over religion, belief systems, race, language, and so on.

And truly, this is a beautiful thing to discover. The libertarian marvels at the cooperation we see in a construction project, an office building, a restaurant, a factory, a shopping mall, to say nothing of a city, a country, or a planet. The harmony of interests doesn’t mean that everyone gets along perfectly, but rather than we inhabit institutions that incentivize progress through ever more cooperative behavior. As the liberals of old say, we believe that the “brotherhood of man” is possible.

The libertarian believes that the best and most wonderful social outcomes are not those planned, structured, and anticipated, but rather the opposite.To the alt-right mind, this all seems ridiculous. Sure, shopping is fine. But what actually characterizes human association is deep-rooted conflict. The races are secretly at war, intellectually and genetically. There is an ongoing and perpetual conflict between the sexes. People of different religions must fight and always will, until one wins. Nations fight for a reason: the struggle is real.

Some argue that war is what defines us and even gives life meaning, and, in that sense, is glorious and celebratory. For this reason, all nations must aspire toward homogeneity in stock, religion, and so on, and, as for the sexes, there must be dominance, because cooperation is an illusion.

Maybe you notice a certain commonality with the left here. In the 19th century, the Marxists whipped themselves up in a frenzy about the allegedly inherent conflict between labor and capital. Their successors fret incessantly about race, ethnicity, ability, gender, and so on, pushing Marxian conflict theory into ever more exotic realms. Ludwig von Mises captured this parallel brilliantly when he wrote, “Nationalist ideology divides society vertically; the socialist ideology divides society horizontally.” Here, as with many other areas, the far right and far left are strangely aligned.

3. Designed vs. Spontaneous Order

The libertarian believes that the best and most wonderful social outcomes are not those planned, structured, and anticipated, but rather the opposite. Society is the result of millions and billions of small acts of rational self interest that are channelled into an undesigned, unplanned, and unanticipated order that cannot be conceived by a single mind. The knowledge that is required to put together a functioning social order is conveyed through institutions: prices, manners, mores, habits, and traditions that no one can consciously will into existence. There must be a process in place, and stable rules governing that process, that permit such institutions to evolve, always in deference to the immutable laws of economics.

Again, the alt-right mind finds all of this uninspired and uninspiring. Society in their conception is built by the will of great thinkers and great leaders with unconstrained visions of what can be. What we see out there operating in society is a result of someone’s intentional and conscious planning from the top down.

If we cannot find the source, or if the source is somehow hiding, we imagine that it must be some shadowy group out there that is manipulating outcomes – and hence the alt-right’s obsession with conspiracy theory. The course of history is designed by someone, so “we” might as well engage in the great struggle to seize the controls – and hence the alt-right obsession with politics as a contact sport.

Oh, and, by the way, economics is a dismal science.

4. Trade and Migration

The libertarian celebrates the profound changes in the world from the late Middle Ages to the age of laissez faire, because we observed how commercial society broke down the barriers of class, race, and social isolation, bringing rights and dignity to ever more people.Of course the classical liberals fought for free trade and free migration of peoples, seeing national borders as arbitrary lines on a map that mercifully restrain the power of the state but otherwise inhibit the progress of prosperity and civilization. To think globally is not a bad thing, but a sign of enlightenment. Protectionism is nothing but a tax on consumers that inhibits industrial productivity and sets nations at odds with each other. The market process is a worldwide phenomenon that indicates an expansion of the division of labor, which means a progressive capacity of people to enhance their standard of living and ennoble their lives.

The alt-right is universally opposed to free trade and free migration. You can always tell a writer is dabbling in alt-right thought (or neoreactionary or Dark Enlightenment or outright fascism) if he or she has an intense focus on international trade as inherently bad or fraudulent or regrettable in some sense. To them, a nation must be strong enough to thrive as an independent unit, an economic sovereignty unto itself.

Today, the alt-right has a particular beef with trade deals, not because they are unnecessarily complex or bureaucratic (which are good reasons to doubt their merit) but because of their meritorious capacity to facilitate international cooperation. And it is the same with immigration. Beginning at some point in the late 19th century, migration came to be seen as a profound threat to national identity, which invariably means racial identity.

5. Emancipation and Progress

The libertarian celebrates the profound changes in the world from the late Middle Ages to the age of laissez faire, because we observed how commercial society broke down the barriers of class, race, and social isolation, bringing rights and dignity to ever more people. Slavery was ended. Women were emancipated, as marriage evolved from conquest and dominance into a free relationship of partnership and consent. This is all a wonderful thing, because rights are universal, which is to say, they rightly belong to everyone equally. Anything that interferes with people’s choices holds them back and hobbles the progress of prosperity, peace, and human flourishing. This perspective necessarily makes the libertarian optimistic about humanity’s potential.

The alt-right mind can’t bear this point of view, and regards it all as naive. What appears to be progress is actually loss: loss of culture, identity, and mission. They look back to what they imagine to be a golden age when elites ruled and peons obeyed. And thus we see the source of their romantic attachment to authority as the source of order, and the longing for authoritarian political rule. As for universal rights, forget it. Rights are granted by political communities and are completely contingent on culture. The ancients universally believed that some were born to serve and some to rule, and the alt-right embraces this perspective. Here again, identity is everything and the loss of identity is the greatest crime against self anyone can imagine.

Conclusion

The alt-right knows exactly who its enemies are, and the libertarians are among them.To be sure, as many commentators have pointed out, both libertarians and alt-rightist are deeply suspicious of democracy. This was not always the case. In the 19th century, the classical liberals generally had a favorable view of democracy, believing it to be the political analogy to choice in the marketplace. But here they imagined states that were local, rules that were fixed and clear, and democracy as a check on power. As states became huge, as power became total, and as rules became subject to pressure-group politics, the libertarianism’s attitude toward democracy shifted.

In contrast, the alt-right’s opposition to democracy traces to its loathing of the masses generally and its overarching suspicion of anything that smacks of equality. In other words, they tend to hate democracy for all the wrong reasons. This similarity is historically contingent and largely superficial given the vast differences that separate the two worldviews. Does society contain within itself the capacity for self management or not? That is the question.

None of this will stop the mainstream media from lumping us all together, given that we share a dread of what has become of the left in politics today.

But make no mistake: the alt-right knows exactly who its enemies are, and the libertarians are among them.

Prologue

This week’s topic is an excerpt from our writing, which happens to coincide with the upcoming publication of Objects in View.

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We were going along living life. There was nothing extraordinary about that day. We were drinking mochas, commuting on interstates, talking on cell phones, eating in restaurants, chatting on the Internet, making money and spending ourselves into debt. In a million parks across the nation, women tickled their babies’ toes and men tossed the Frisbee for their dogs. We were all tied up in the latest reality show or political drama, downloading our personal playlist from the Internet, and ordering baubles from afar. The President was talking on television that night and a lot of us were gathered around to absorb his latest lies.

And, then, suddenly, it all ended. There was no warning. The life we knew just ended. In the days that followed we learned the details – the number of people dead, the number of cities decimated, the millions of connections that were severed, destabilizing the fragile network of our society. That devastation did not touch us because we were rural, but what followed would transform our lives in unexpected ways.

The coming days would redefine who we were. We’d stop being afraid of the paper tigers the elites used to distract us and start concentrating on the very real dangers that had been lurking all around us.

But first, we had to learn that rescue was not coming and that we needed to save ourselves.                                     JT Delaney

 

Objects in View is on pre-order right now. You can reserve it and also pick up the first book in the series Life As We Knew It on 99 cent sale TODAY ONLY.

 

If the world as you knew it suddenly spun out of your control, what would you do and where would you go?

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