Ryan Booth: I don’t really care about the details of the attacks in Santa Cruz.

That’s your prerogative, but why write about something if you don’t care enough about it to find out whether the things you’re writing are true or false?

Ryan Booth: What’s the other possibility?

As I already explained: “There are some self-identified anarchists who genuinely believe that street riots, and in particular trashing capitalist businesses, are legitimate and productive tactics for social transformation. And other anarchists who do not believe that. Besides that, there are also lots of people loosely associated with radical politics who like to use Anarchist dress and symbols for their radical flair, but know little or nothing about Anarchism as a body of ideas or as a social movement.” The rioters in Santa Cruz might well have been Anarchists; or they might have been kids who think that circle-As are cool and whose understanding of Anarchism comes from Hot Topic and the Sex Pistols. I could tell you which I think is more likely (that it probably was mostly a loosely-affiliate bunch of the smashy-smashy kind Anarchists–the kind whose understanding of Anarchism I disagree with–but I doubt you’d be interested in a long explanation of why. I wrote “possibly” because I do try to limit myself to talking about the things where I know what I’m talking about.

Ryan Booth: think the facts strongly suggest that there was a connection, but again, I have not followed that story in the last two weeks, nor do I have any obligation to do so.

I get it; you’re a busy man, and you no doubt don’t have time to do more than trade in baseless speculation and innuendo. But if you do so, then folks who do actually know something about the situation are going to call you on it, and to point out that you don’t actually know what you’re talking about. No point in getting sniffy about that; it’s just the way it is when you insist on how you have no obligation to know what you’re talking about before you talk about it.

Darian,

Well, I think that what’s happening is that Anarchism has become the default form, and the most innovative moral and political center, of the radical Left, and of revolutionary thinking. If you’re doing far-Left organizing, even if you’re not an Anarchist, you can’t avoid Anarchist ideas, forms of organization, ideas about process and procedure, and predecessors having done the organizing on the ground.

Revolutionary Marxism in general, and the Russian- and Chinese-backed Communist Party organizations in particular, used to play that role: CP members were all over the union movement, the early Civil Rights movement, the antiwar movement, etc., and even the reformists in these movements looked to Communist ideas and organizations as the folks immediately to their Left. But that development was a historical aberration, anyway: in many ways, Anarchists had already occupied the position of the default ideology of radical Leftists from roughly the 1880s-1920s, especially within the U.S.; the Leninists managed to seize the position away from us, while the Cold War lasted, because the Russian and Chinese governments were funnelling millions of dollars from their captive empire to subsidize revolutionary M-L organizing (at a time when Anarchists were reeling from a particularly intense wave of government violence and repression). That began to crack up in the 1960s with the Sino-Soviet split and the decline of the Bolshevik Empire; it defintively collapsed along with the Berlin Wall, and ever since then Anarchism has been on the rise, with Seattle as a real watershed moment of establishing ourselves as the paradigm for radical Leftism.

Anyway, the point of that whole historical side-trip is that, as we have become the default example of the radical Left, we’re now also the default target for baiting from people who want to distance themselves from a boogieman. Glenn Beck’s conspiratorial org charts linking the AFL-CIO to EVIL CADRES OF COMMUNIST ANARCHIST REVOLUTIONARIES!@$#!@! are no different from the Birchers’ efforts to link anyone and everyone to the CPUSA; it’s just that, whereas they were the people that you looked to for revolutionary thinking in the 1950s-1960s, Anarchists are the people that you looked to now.

Alexander Berkman:

No wonder people don’t take anarchism seriously.

You never know, but I’m willing to bet that Rachel Maddow’s reasons for not taking Anarchism seriously have very little to do with any market Anarchist’s comments about Somalia. I suspect that it has more to do with not knowing much of anything that any Anarchist of any tendency has ever said about anything.

As for “actual historical Anarchism,” well, whatever, man; I could sit here and dish about Proudhon and Warren and Tucker and why you’re wrong, but who really cares? If the kind of stuff I’m into were a new development in Anarchism, that’s not an argument against it. There are lots of new developments in Anarchism all the time which turn out to be good ideas. Lots also that turn out to be bad ideas; that’s the thing about being in an innovative social movement instead of some kind of blockheaded hypertraditionalist church. If you have an argument that this is not a good direction for Anarchism to take, fine, you can make that argument; but simply asserting that these newfangled ideas you kids aren’t promoting aren’t like the ideas that Alexander Berkman had is just a stupid form of conservatism. Not an argument.

mythago:

But Boaz’s point wasn’t just about the Gilded Age; the problem wasn’t “1880s, good/bad” but the kind of privileged perspective that grants the luxury of viewing civil rights as an abstract question.

Yes, I agree. Boaz isn’t the first to raise that point within debates about this kind of Old Republic nostalgia, but his article did do a good job of articulating the worry.

Boaz noted that this not only cripples the validity of Hornberger’s analysis, but it cripples Libertarianism as a philosophy;

Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by “libertarianism as a philosophy,” and who and what you take to be representative of it. I certainly agree that it causes some serious problems for some parts of libertarianism as a political movement–it goes a long way towards explaining, for example, the endless stupid problems that the Libertarian Party or quasi-libertarian Constitutionalists like Rand Paul get themselves into, for example. I’m not interested in trying to save either the Libertarian Party or Rand Paul’s campaign, since I consider them to be wastes of time and organizing energy, but, looking at the social movement more broadly, the sooner that sort of privileged bunkum becomes unpopular and gets you laughed at or shown the door, the better.

And while that problem isn’t limited to Libertarians, it’s a serious problem and it’s why Rand shot himself in the foot. He doesn’t need to think about civil rights much, so he didn’t have a deeper answer

Sure, I agree with you about all that. Like I said at the outset, my interest here is certainly not in defending Rand Paul or the viewpoint from which he understands libertarianism. It’s just to point out that more radical and consistent forms of libertarianism are on offer, and that “the idea at the core of libertarianism” doesn’t have the conservative implications that Jeff Fecke suggested, if your notions of consensual social organization are less constricted (and more closely based on the history of the direct-action sit-in movement itself) than either Paul’s or Maddow’s.

Myca:

I meant it to modify the former and was clumsy in my construction. Sorry about that

O.K., no problem. I’m sorry to belabor the point on something you didn’t mean to say in the first place, then.

It’s as if there was a high-profile extended argument among online liberals over whether or not the USSR ought to be our model for an ideal society. You’d find that disturbing, right?

Myca, I’ve clocked at least as many hours in “Progressive” and radical Left circles in my life as I have in libertarian circles. (It comes with being an Anarchist.) I quite meant it when I mentioned hearing similarly shitty things in a lot of political circles. For example, back when I was more involved with the leftish end of Democratic Party politics, I remember being directly involved in debates with “Progressive” dudes who were convinced that Progressives should stop worrying so much about Roe v. Wade, because abortion rights are “divisive” and taking a stand against forced pregnancy was allegedly driving “working-class” voters (by which they meant working-class white men) to vote Republican. I also recall several conversations, especially around 2002-2005 or so, in which “Progressives” explicitly pined for the days when the Democratic Party was “a national party” and hoped for a day when it would “be a national party again.” (Like it was back in the good ol’ days from 1932-1964, when the national Democratic Party maintained its position by supporting Jim Crow parties throughout the “Solid South,” and the Democratic leadership included august statesmen like Theodore Bilbo, Jim Eastland, Richard Russell, George Wallace, J. Strom Thurmond, et al.)

I did find these debates disturbing, and did my best to call them out on it at the time. So did a number of the people I knew through various feminist blogs. This is old news, no? Calling out this kind of wack privilege is unfortunately something that happens a lot pretty much wherever you go in political circles.

Jeremy P:

Government in itself is neither good nor bad it is just a tool.

So’s an atom bomb. Some tools have fewer productive uses than others.