Comedian Dave Smith joins me to talk about his new show, Part of the Problem, and why he thinks the right is more interested in war than the left is in peace and prosperity. We also talk about the current state of politics in America, and why the right seems to have advanced itself into a place of primacy over the left.
00:01:02.340Well, I've got a feeling that we're going to disappoint people by agreeing once again far more than we're supposed to.
00:01:07.620I wanted to start with something we'll probably agree on a decent amount, which is kind of the approach that America has currently taken to war, the way that the Uniparty seems to address it.
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00:02:30.880So Dave, when I was a kid, I grew up, I was in a military family, my dad was in the Air Force, I grew up in Air Force bases, you know, the idea that he could be shipped out was a real thing, knew a lot of people in the military, and so I kind of felt like a natural conservative.
00:02:48.500I grew up on talk radio, you know, when 9-11 happened, it felt only natural that we would go out and defend ourselves.
00:02:57.360You know, the way we understood combat was nation states were responsible for warfare, and so if something attacked your, you know, inside your borders, if there's attack inside your borders, you had to go out and punish a nation state.
00:03:13.040Now, over time, it seems to, there's been a great shift.
00:03:16.720Now, it seems like the left, who had, you know, all of this credibility for being anti-war in Vietnam and, you know, hating Ronald Reagan and his strength through, or his peace through strength initiatives and those kind of things, they've completely changed their tune.
00:03:33.620Now they seem more than happy to be as bloodthirsty as any neoconservative ever was.
00:03:38.380And the right seems to be in a mixed situation.
00:03:42.520Half of it kind of wants to be neutral or against war in general.
00:03:47.160Half of it still seems to be tied into the interests of the kind of the larger empire.
00:03:52.640What do you think about the shift over time where we continually have kind of this interest of both parties in moving wars forward, but it's just whichever one seems to have advanced itself into a place of primacy?
00:04:08.380And so much of this has happened, like, in our lifetimes, because it really is, it is a different situation since 9-11.
00:04:15.460I mean, it's not, obviously, America has fought a lot of wars before 9-11, and we were, essentially, since World War II, the empire of the world.
00:04:24.680But it wasn't exactly accepted that we were in a permanent, perpetual state of war, that there would always be a war to be fought.
00:04:33.660And, of course, you know, as you pointed out, like, in Vietnam, the left-wingers were the ones who really predominantly made up the anti-war movement.
00:04:42.120Although, something that's kind of ironic about that, if you look back on it now, Vietnam really is the time when the right-wing loses the culture in America, and it was very related to that war.
00:04:54.480So, in hindsight, it's almost like, if you look at it, you're like, man, the right-wingers should have been the most opposed to this war.
00:04:59.980And there was firm tradition for them to oppose it on.
00:05:03.840But, look, I mean, after 9-11, the left-wingers continued to be the force in the anti-war movement.
00:05:10.720And the anti-war movement was pretty strong in America throughout the George W. Bush years.
00:05:14.860So, I really think that it was Barack Obama who killed the anti-war left.
00:05:20.580And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that it is just so deep-rooted in the DNA of liberal Americans to identify as the not-racist group.
00:05:34.700Of course, I think we've seen over the last few years how defenseless they've been for these forces of wokeism, because if the penalty for not complying is you get called a racist, well, that's just too steep a penalty for most liberal Americans to pay, because that's their entire identity.
00:05:51.780And Barack Obama was their charming black friend, and it was much easier to just be quiet or even work out some justification than to come to the conclusion that your cool black friend is a horrific war criminal.
00:06:08.020And then, of course, on the right, I think that really starting with Ron Paul planting the seeds, but much more so with Donald Trump, the right half of America was kind of given permission to be anti-war.
00:06:19.080As Tucker Carlson recently said on my show, Donald Trump made it so that it wasn't like, oh, you're anti-war because you're against America.
00:06:27.620It was more like, no, because I love America so much, I oppose these wars that have done nothing but damage to us.
00:06:32.960I think, unfortunately, since somewhere right around October 7th, I'm just pulling that date out of thin air, it seems like about 50% of the right wing has been transported back to 2003 or something like that.
00:06:47.080But there's certainly another portion of the right wing that has not.
00:06:51.460And that dynamic has been very fascinating to watch.
00:06:54.960Yeah, there's a little bit of foreign policy amnesia that suddenly struck about half of the commentariat, to be sure.
00:07:02.160I'm interested in that transition you talked about, though.
00:07:05.700Like you said, Ron Paul obviously is somebody who was talking about the importance of pulling back American foreign policy for a long time.
00:07:14.980One thing I want to get to is really the kind of overlap between paleo-conservatives and paleo-libertarians here in a second.
00:07:23.920They're both being right on this issue.
00:07:26.540But it was interesting that it took Trump to make this transition.
00:07:30.440Part of my theory as to why the right was primed for this is when you look back to something like Vietnam, that was a war that was still largely fought by most of the country, though a lot of rich liberals managed to get their way out of it by using college deferment and things.
00:07:48.240It suddenly became a class stratification.
00:07:50.420If your parents could get you into college, you didn't have to go to the Vietnam War.
00:07:54.840And so that was a big reason that the left happened to be anti-wars.
00:07:58.520It also happened to have this cultural out to exempt itself from having to fight.
00:08:03.520But it was the last war, I think, that was largely fought by America.
00:08:07.940And post-Vietnam, the wars were really fought by a professional military force and not a conscripted force.
00:08:14.600And that meant that legacy involvement, enlistment, was really the key to keeping American military prowess going.
00:08:23.500And that mainly meant Red America, right?
00:08:32.600There's a very particular section of the country that started to become kind of the legacy warriors, especially when it came to frontline combatant conditions.
00:08:42.900I think a lot of those people went to war.
00:08:45.520A lot of my friends went to Afghanistan, went to Iraq.
00:08:49.640And they didn't come back, came back hurt.
00:08:52.880I think these are the people who came from the heartland, were the ones fighting these wars.
00:08:58.140And I think over time, it became clear to Red America that there's a cost here that they're bearing, the brunt of.
00:09:05.200But they never had the words to say why it was okay to oppose it.
00:09:08.800Like you said, there was never this opposition to the war, was opposition to the things that their sons had died for or sacrificed for.
00:09:15.840But Trump gave them the way to say, no, I care about my sons.
00:09:25.860Well, and there's like the social psychology of the whole thing, which is what so much of politics, in terms of like how voters feel politically, so much of it runs off that.
00:09:39.280We're all probably guilty of this to some degree.
00:09:42.320Like even just kind of being on the same side as some like crazy left wingers in the war in Israel makes me uncomfortable.
00:09:49.940And I'm like, God, I wish I could just be not on their side on this, you know.
00:09:53.400But so during the George W. Bush days, right, there were, if you were being against the war, it was like, well, who are you, Susan Sarandon or Michael Moore or something like that?
00:10:06.460And to most right wingers, that's just like a sickening idea.
00:10:09.660Like, oh, I would never want to be like that.
00:10:11.720And so I do think it took figures like, you know, Ron Paul, who obviously was very libertarian, but is just personally about as conservative as you can get.
00:10:20.980You know, a guy who looks like he, you know what I mean, a country doctor who's been married to the same woman for like 50 years and is a very personally conservative person who's a Republican making a constitutional argument.
00:10:33.980And then Donald Trump, who is making a purely America first argument.
00:11:04.360And I remember this being really pretty amazing that he got more money from active duty military members than all the other Republicans combined.
00:11:12.080And then, of course, this was repeated when he ran in 2012.
00:11:15.060And Donald Trump just cleaned house on military support over these Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio types who are advocating these wars.
00:11:21.720And it does it does kind of make sense that once you gave them an out, once you left them a pathway to be able to leave and not abandon their entire identity.
00:11:29.700I mean, who knows better than the guy who's seen his buddies getting killed over there comes back and, you know, is suffering from PTSD or whatever.
00:11:39.060And and and and for what so that ISIS could take over the province that you just liberated a few years ago.
00:11:44.960I mean, you know, it's it's it seems like it was a very like kind of natural step for them to realize, which has been a big theme, I think, in the right half of America over the last decade or so to kind of wake up and realize like, wow, we really got lied to and we really got screwed over.
00:12:00.620Yeah. And it's interesting because a lot of these guys aren't anti-war.
00:12:05.040I mean, they're they're in the military for a reason, but I know guys who were just, you know, absolutely traumatized because they show up, they watch people get killed and then they realize their buddies getting killed because they're defending Afghans who are trading eight year old boys.
00:12:19.320Yeah, you know, and that's something that you can get people to kill for your homeland, to defend the heartland, to defend their neighbors, the people that they love.
00:12:28.820But when this is the stuff you're asking people to go out and fight for, I mean, they're they're just that's going to break them.
00:12:36.100Understandably, it should it should it should wound anybody.
00:12:39.400100 percent, 100 percent. And like in the in the military, right, whenever you have a military force, it's a magnet for different types of people.
00:12:46.000So there are people who go in there who are just like kind of troubled people who want to commit acts of violence and they go, oh, this is a way to legally do that.
00:12:52.940There are people who go in there because they've been, quite frankly, bribed into doing it.
00:12:56.540They have very little opportunity and this will give them more opportunity.
00:12:59.140But there's a huge percentage of people who join, particularly in the post 9-11 days, who joined with like the noblest of intentions and were really like, hey, I'm going to defend our country so that no one comes over here and kills my mom and my sister and my little brother.
00:13:16.560And I'm going to and I'll risk my life to go take on that fight.
00:13:19.940And so particularly for those people who are the ones who went for the right reasons, that's got to be the toughest to be kind of go through that disillusion process of realizing that you were you were propagandized.
00:13:32.280So obviously, I think we understand kind of why the right started to feel this.
00:13:37.620I think it's also partly because what the empire was became a little more obvious, you know, that for a long time, the empire kind of ran alongside American identity.
00:13:48.020It's still, you know, gave a lip service to faith and freedom, spreading democracy, these kind of things, maybe even economic opportunity or something like that.
00:13:58.800But as it became very clear that these overarching institutions are looking to destroy fundamental conservative values, it became harder and harder to sell this.
00:14:08.120And now this is the reason that, like you said, they were able to sell this to the left is, you know, I used to joke about the gender regime change, you know, but here we are.
00:14:16.260This is literally the ideology they use.
00:14:21.080I mean, people in Ukraine need to be able to get gay married.
00:14:23.480And so that's that's why we've got to we've got to go to war.
00:14:26.680That seems to be a very real ideological shift.
00:14:30.080You know, all of our all of our embassies are raising the pride flag above like the Holy See.
00:14:35.120You know, this is the flag of the American empire has no red or white or blue involved in the thing.
00:14:41.240And it's just I think that that shift that has allowed the left to throw basically everything.
00:14:47.040And you have to wonder, was the left ever really anti-war or was this is this is it really simply a case of friend and enemy, whoever happens to be in the levers of power at the time?
00:14:59.260I mean, what do you think about that ideological justification allowing them to make that transition?
00:15:05.120Yeah, it's you know, I don't know that I have the exact answer to it.
00:15:08.740I mean, look, I think there were people on the ground, you know, say in the anti-war Vietnam protests like left wingers there or left wingers who were protesting the war in Iraq who were sincere and were really against the wars and really thought it was horrible.
00:15:26.800But the thing is, you know, the way human psychology works is a little bit tricky, like it's very easy.
00:15:32.340People compartmentalize things and rationalize things.
00:15:35.500And unfortunately, I mean, the overwhelming majority of people are kind of followers and they kind of follow whatever is in front of them.
00:15:43.460And I personally think that there was there was an enormous effort with a lot of funding behind it to push all of the woke stuff, say, since around 2011, 2012 to present date to really expedite that process.
00:16:01.600Now, you can trace the seeds of it to much earlier than that, but I do think that the essentially the left was completely sabotaged by big court by corporate America.
00:16:15.100And they were so pushed and then willingly entered into the kind of identitarian space that after a certain point, that's all that mattered to them.
00:16:26.260And like the original cause seems to be at this point, like completely gone.
00:16:31.540There is a sliver of the left that is still really principled and anti-war, whatever other disagreements we might have with them, but who really are against the wars.
00:16:41.240And the rest of them, I think, yeah, probably would, if you said it was to stop a trans genocide, would probably support just about any war you could think of.
00:16:50.260Yeah, I mean, I do have a begrudging respect for the dedicated like economic Marxists or anti-war guy like, you know, that has just watched their movement get entirely eaten.
00:17:00.680I mean, in my mind, I like my belief is that their movement was always actually about the gay space communism.
00:17:06.940Like that was always the actual, you know, that was the real ideology and the anti-war stuff or the economics was just the window dressing.
00:17:16.720But I do have a begrudging respect for the true believers who are still holding.
00:17:21.860It's like the classical liberal who still believes in free speech and things like that.
00:17:31.700You know, yes, they were deluded, but at least they really believed in it.
00:17:35.680Well, there certainly was something in the left that was always about deconstructing, you know.
00:17:41.860And so what you would point to to say we're deconstructing this, I think a lot of leftists would point to like, well, look, this thing is represented by the warfare machine.
00:17:54.480But then when you move on to another topic, it's like, well, now let's deconstruct the family or let's deconstruct religion or whatever.
00:18:00.660And it is almost like this energy where they're just going to keep eating things.
00:18:05.120And so, you know, like, again, you could argue, at least in the abstract, if let's just say, broadly speaking, the left wing is kind of about tearing systems down and the right wing is about preserving existing systems.
00:18:17.580You could say, well, then there would be a situation where both would be necessary, like if there's a truly, you know, corrupt system, you'd want that torn down.
00:18:26.160And if it's not truly corrupt, you'd want someone fighting to not tear it down.
00:18:29.880The problem is that, to me at least, the left had so spun out of control, particularly in the last 10, 15 years, that it is now it is attacking everything with no discretion.
00:18:43.860And if you listen to even radical left wingers from like the 80s or 90s, they would sound like, I don't know, maybe establishment Republicans today.
00:18:54.060Like they wouldn't go nearly as far as as the ones what they advocate today.
00:18:58.400So, you know, regardless whether that was always like deep embedded in them or not, it's certainly either way, it has accelerated in recent history.
00:19:07.260Yeah, I think the understanding of the left is entropy is a very useful tool.
00:19:12.680And I think, yeah, like you said, it's accelerated to a point where there's not even any any limiter on what they're going to what they're going to do at this point.
00:19:19.460There's just everything needs to be can be constructed because that's all there is left to do.
00:19:23.680And that's that's kind of why it ends up dooming civilizations if it's allowed to continue unchecked.
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00:21:15.540All right, so I lied. Before we disagree, let's agree one more time.
00:21:20.220So why were the paleo-libertarians and the paleo-conservatives right?
00:27:14.020My customers are telling me this is what they want.
00:27:16.660I'm going to repeat that back to them.
00:27:18.480And all of a sudden, the media was terrified because he said things like Muslim ban and in foreign wars.
00:27:22.760And like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can't listen to what these people actually want.
00:27:27.020And so I think that one of the reasons they're so apoplectic about Trump is even though they controlled him relatively well when he was in office, he's not really on board with the continuation empire.
00:27:40.180And he is asking the question, for better or for worse, you know, what is good for America?
00:27:45.160You know, actually putting America first.
00:27:47.160And even though he might not have the intellectual standing of a Pat Buchanan, he still summons those forces.
00:28:10.500And I think he just knew it was just so obvious to him.
00:28:13.040And then I think in kind of in a gloriously ignorant way, like, I think he was just kind of like, because I think Donald Trump, if there's a simple answer, he'll just tell himself that's because I'm so smart and everyone else is so stupid.
00:28:46.920And I think that there's like all of those things.
00:28:49.660Those are really the three major things that he ran on in 2016.
00:28:52.800And I think he probably thought, oh, everyone else is too stupid to realize that this is a really good idea to do all of this when, in fact, it was more like they're bought and paid for and you're not allowed to say this stuff.
00:29:03.200And so there were a lot of things he said as far as like why the regime hates him so much.
00:29:08.680There's certainly a lot of things he said that you weren't supposed to say.
00:29:11.740But I also think there was something just kind of deeper.
00:29:15.200And if anyone listening, if you haven't read, I highly recommend go check out Murray Rothbard's, the title, the piece was called, I believe it was, The Case for Right-Wing Populism.
00:29:26.500And this is a piece that was very controversial, particularly left libertarians who got very offended because they're allergic to anything that might, you know, like literally if you actually read the piece, he doesn't say one nice word about David Duke.
00:29:38.640But if you bring up David Duke and aren't just shrieking that he's a racist, that's already, you know, too, like anyone on the left is allergic to that.
00:31:06.280But it doesn't scare him like right-wing populism does.
00:31:08.660And I think just Donald Trump being who he is, talking to right-wingers, saying drain the swamp and they're the problem.
00:31:16.880Look, the difference between left-wingers and right-wingers when they're involved in, like, some populist campaign is, like, who is Bernie Sanders really talking to?
00:31:55.460So I think there's certainly a lot of things Donald Trump said that pisses them off.
00:31:59.380But I think the nature of what he was doing was not allowed.
00:32:03.260Like everything in our political world is by design.
00:32:07.700You know, it's not a coincidence that – like if you look at Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Mitt Romney and you think about the right-wing, the right half of America, just right-wing America, red America in general, you might ask yourself, why is their leader a freaking nerd?
00:32:46.820I try to explain this to people because you're exactly right that I try to explain this to a lot of people who are policy wonks and they're dialed in to platforms and tight rhetorical loops and making sure that you have every agency mapped out before you go in.
00:33:03.600And they're like, why isn't someone afraid of Ron DeSantis the way they're afraid of Donald Trump?
00:33:07.680Like, okay, Donald Trump is holding a live wire.
00:33:10.880Okay, that's why they're afraid of Donald Trump.
00:33:14.180It doesn't have, you know, yes, you're right.
00:33:17.100He's got these policy positions they don't like.
00:33:19.100But the main problem with Donald Trump is he's actually holding a live wire.
00:33:22.160And everyone else has a nicely managed cable set.
00:33:25.340Everybody else is well shielded, put away.
00:33:28.560There's no danger at the end of the day.
00:33:30.420They all all of them are too there's too much that they owe to the system that they would they would have to capitulate on to, you know, even even if you're somebody who's very good at working on policy, you have to do it inside a particular framework.
00:33:55.540You know, it's like in the same way that, you know, like if you were like at a bar, there could be one guy who you could just tell is tough just by looking at him like the way he carries himself, the way he walks into the bar.
00:34:06.240You're like, that guy, that guy is ready to fight.
00:34:10.240And then there could be some other loudmouth guy like I'll fight anyone in here.
00:34:14.120And you're like, yeah, you're saying it, but you're not like emoting it to me.
00:34:18.160DeSantis can get up there and say, I'm the anti woke guy and I'm against the left because look at what they're trying to do and this and that and that.
00:34:25.540Donald Trump just has to be Donald Trump.
00:34:27.900And you're like, that's the most anti woke figure I've ever seen in my life.
00:34:31.500Just this proud billionaire who's like, you know, would be bragging to you about how many chicks he's banged if you were in a back room with him.
00:34:39.340Like he doesn't have to, like, convince you he's that because he just is that thing.
00:35:08.500Like the regime is trying to get this guy arrested and locked out of the thing for it.
00:35:12.800And sometimes you just have to understand the moment rather than, again, trying to trying to work out all of the little policy positions and the platforms and thinking that you can Karl Rove your way into politics forever.
00:35:23.600At some point, politics escapes the money ball phenomenon and instead goes back to kind of a forces of history happening.
00:35:31.440And I think that that's kind of where we are.
00:36:08.540So I think his main strength is restating Bertrand de Juvenal.
00:36:14.260The reason that Hoppe is so good at explaining the failures of democracy is he's taking the metaphysics of power from Bertrand de Juvenal in his book on power.
00:37:09.200She's not really – she's not following the dictators else.
00:37:13.060Anyway, but like in the sense that like if you come over to my house and we have dinner or something like that, I could – I can dictate what you can and can't say.
00:37:23.980I could say if you do this, you got to get out of my house.
00:37:26.260I could be as tyrannical as I want to be and then – you know what I mean?
00:37:29.340But if I were to tell you, you know, we tend to not think of each other as, say, dictators because, no, it's just kind of like this is your property.
00:37:37.220And then the question becomes about the libertarian gripe with governments is that they violate the property rights of individuals.
00:37:46.060And so if you're saying we would construct governments based off of property rights that are either voluntarily, you know, like exchanged or first homesteaded or whatever, then, yes, I could see where you would say there would still be a group of people who are in charge within this property.
00:38:02.440But I think the key distinction to libertarians, it would be almost like saying that – like, okay, you're saying you want to get rid of rape, but you're saying you would still have sex.
00:38:13.020So isn't that really the same thing by a different name?
00:38:15.540And it's like, well, no, the point is that what's evil and then what also leads to all of these negative outcomes is when you give people the ability to override property rights.
00:38:26.120And that basically I think – and what Hoppe's argument would be is that the core of civilization and particularly everything great about Western civilization is a respect for property rights.
00:38:36.100So I guess the problem is that the state is – this is a way of looking at the state as if we're in an original position type scenario, right, like a state of nature.
00:38:46.720And this is always the core problem with liberalism, like classical liberalism, not, you know, crazy lefty, you know, progressives.
00:38:58.440It always starts with how can we construct man, right?
00:39:03.160It looks from the outside and says if we were in some kind of position where we could make these decisions completely separated from different circumstances and natures, this is what we're going to develop.
00:39:17.520These are the rules that we're going to set in place.
00:39:19.900But that's not actually how people find themselves in the world.
00:39:22.780And the state is pretty much the most organic institution alongside the family, you know, it's one of the most enduring creations of all human civilization.
00:39:32.260And so the problem, I guess, when I talk to most libertarians – and we'll have to get deeper, you know, it may not be true of you, so we'll flesh that out.
00:39:41.600But the problem I look – when I talk to most libertarians is they're just ignoring the fact that this is as key to human nature as pretty much anything else, right?
00:39:50.740Like the problem with communism is that it denies human nature, right?
00:40:35.000And if you tried to sell things, it was a violation of your religion in certain scenarios to move property to sell it in a contractual manner.
00:40:43.920And so I'm not sure that the property rights, as we understand them, are something that's enduring and really a way in which we can deny the existence of the state.
00:40:55.260So, look, if you're going to say that, you know, like the creations of governments are natural and that – and, you know, this is kind of just the state of how human beings are and we can't necessarily change all of these things.
00:41:08.240So it's not – I don't think that libertarians are doing the same thing that, like, lefty communists are doing where they kind of would just openly say, well, we can create a new communist man who doesn't care about his own self-interest and cares about the community.
00:41:23.380I think what – by that track, I mean, look, murder and rape and theft and all of these things are also just as natural and have never not existed.
00:41:33.480But we can also still recognize that we'd all like to limit them as much as possible.
00:41:37.280And so it's not even an argument that that isn't somehow within our nature.
00:41:41.300It's just recognizing that for the process of civilization, you want to try to limit these barbaric behaviors as much as possible.
00:41:48.680So what Hoppe would be arguing is that, look, even in ancient times when they had no conception of what we think of as modern-day, you know, legitimate property rights, they – in the same sense that they may not have had any conception of modern scientific understandings, that doesn't mean they still didn't exist in a sense.
00:42:10.580So they just – like, you've always had this dynamic where human beings have – they control physically their own bodies and they can only control other people's bodies against their will if they, you know, initiate force on them.
00:42:25.440And that we have scarce resources that we need to – in order to live and to live and prosper.
00:42:34.440And so the idea is that basically almost every civilization ever is going to have a system of assigning property rights.
00:42:41.060Now, that may not be like Lockean property rights, but almost every society ever would have a system of saying whose this is and whose that is.
00:42:49.340And that – and this would be Hoppe's argument that the only way to do this as conflict-free as possible is to have a system of assigning property rights where there's as little conflict as possible.
00:43:01.980And so as little conflict as possible, the starting point would be that I own myself and you own yourself, and then it would go to whoever mixes their labor, and then it would go to voluntary trade.
00:43:11.520Now, there was one other thing you hit that I really wanted to respond to, but I'm blanking on it.
00:43:16.860So I guess the problem is while, you know, we might cook that up and that might sound good at first, the truth is that, like, the reason that civilizations form is that, you know, banditry is the most natural response.
00:43:32.860Like roving bands, you know, there's a reason that every civilization eventually gets knocked over by a bunch of guys running off the Eurasian steppe with horse archery, right?
00:43:43.060And so the reason that we end up kind of developing the way that we do is that monopolies on violence are what actually allows for the increasing complexity of civilization and that someone's going to need to establish a monopoly on violence.
00:43:59.020You don't actually move forward usually in human organization until that question has been removed off the table.
00:44:05.200You can try to reduce it down to every individual, but the truth is that the vast majority of people are never going to be able to manage that,
00:44:11.080which is why you built entire aristocracies because you handed that, you know, security function off, you know, for that particular reason.
00:44:18.160That's why feudalism and things reign in the moments when centralized governments are unavailable because they're able to manage small units of property and defend them from roving bands, right?
00:44:27.520It's the first way that you can create a secure mini state.
00:44:31.060And so the problem that I think I run into with most libertarians that want to, like, disassemble the state, I mean, some of them are narco feudalists.
00:44:38.780So if that's kind of your bag, then, well, maybe you've got an argument there.
00:44:42.760But if you're just trying to eliminate the monopoly on violence from a state and trying to return it to private security forces or individuals,
00:44:52.480I mean, the private security force is just going to become the state at some point, right?
00:44:55.540Like, how do we actually hand off this function in a way that doesn't guarantee we're eventually just going to reestablish state in another form?
00:45:04.560Well, I mean, OK, so number one, I would say if the argument for a state would be that if we didn't have a state in the worst case scenario, we could get a state again.
00:45:15.120And I don't think that's actually a very strong argument for a state because the fear is that we could end up back with what we have.
00:45:21.400I know. So look, there are actually institutions that people would have made, I think, very similar arguments for, like, say, slavery.
00:45:30.080And you can argue that slavery still exists in different ways in the world, and that's probably true to some extent.
00:45:36.560But certainly the form of slavery that was dominant throughout the West was abolished, went away, and isn't coming back anytime soon.
00:45:45.920And so I don't think it's necessarily a given that this violent monopoly must be maintained and it could never be decentralized because it would always have to grow back up.
00:45:55.640I don't think that's true. And I think in many areas there we can look all around us and see lots of things where essentially there is anarchy in one particular area and it actually ends up being quite orderly and civilized.
00:46:11.620For example, the evolution of language, which now, of course, the left has attacked and is now being kind of controlled from the top down in a different type of way.
00:46:20.200But I'm saying over hundreds of years, not just over the last couple of decades, you can look at the fact that language is something that just organically develops.
00:46:28.200And typically speaking, dictionaries are not like barking out instructions to people.
00:46:33.060They're just collecting information and storing it for you.
00:46:37.020See, I look at things much more, and this is the Hoppian position as well.
00:46:41.620That I think if you're going to talk about the, there are several false assumptions in classical liberalism.
00:46:49.860And the classical liberalism is the tradition that libertarianism comes out of.
00:46:54.740I don't think those same false assumptions exist within libertarianism.
00:46:58.600And I think that, in fact, if you look at where classical liberalism has failed, I think it's in their many fatal conceits to statism, the central most one being democracy.
00:47:11.620And that, more or less, is what's led us down this path that we find ourselves in today.
00:47:19.880If you're going to help me back on democracy, then I don't even know how we're supposed to do a show here.
00:47:25.180But look, I mean, one of the central flaws of democracy is that basically, and this is why, look, even like, say, and take the racial aspect of it out, because I'm sure most people today object to that.
00:47:36.760But if you think about, like, the founding fathers even saying that you had to be a property owner to vote, well, you can obviously see the logic in that, especially if you're talking about the late 1700s, where you go like, yeah, but if we give everybody who doesn't own anything the right to vote, they're just going to vote that everyone who owns stuff has to give it to them.
00:47:57.280And then we'll all be broke, and then this whole thing doesn't work.
00:47:59.760It's like it's so self-evident in a way that that couldn't possibly work.
00:48:03.620But in the same sense, that essentially is the problem of democracy, is that you can vote for other people's stuff or for other people's rights to be violated or whatever, and that there's always going to be a way that you can play on that.
00:48:18.040And so essentially, the way I look at it is that libertarianism is one form of limiting that, of limiting your ability to vote away all of the productive members of society who are probably the people who you want to incentivize and who you want other people to mirror.
00:48:37.040So I'd say that's one of the major flaws of classical liberalism, I think, as well as maintaining government monopolies on several important services, which now, as you've seen, if you give governments those monopolies, it's just going to grow and grow and grow.
00:48:51.800Well, again, I'm with Hoppe when it comes to the failures of classical liberalism and the failures of democracy.
00:48:58.600Again, he's pulling directly from Bertrand Juvenile.
00:49:00.980If you've never read On Power, I highly recommend it, because if you enjoy Hoppe…
00:49:10.700I was just going to say, yeah, that's great that you've read it, because that gives you a strong background for…
00:49:15.280Because I think, you know, I think Hoppe's right when he's talking about why monarchy has a, you know, a better time preference and a better, you know, the property rights of the monarch actually incentivize the, you know, the better care of the state.
00:49:30.880And also, most importantly, I think the thing that probably doesn't get talked about enough, but I think is a really important point that both Hoppe and DeJuvenile make, is the fact that democracy opens up the rationale for state power.
00:49:45.020Because the king was one man, but speaking with the voice of the entire people is what gives you the levee on mass.
00:49:51.120It's what gives you mass conscription.
00:49:55.320No, listen, I was even arguing with people just this week about the war in Gaza, and I've heard a bunch of people say, and they'll just be like, you know, the world voted in 1947, and that's what created the state of Israel.
00:50:08.760Even though there were no Arabs at the United Nations at the time, and the United Nations was like a year old, it was literally just like four countries who really had power there.
00:50:16.500But there just is this thing like, the world voted, and therefore this is legitimate now.
00:50:22.100And that's the same kind of idea that I think it…
00:50:26.000Before the rise of democracies, I don't think people had as much of a view of like, the government is us, and we are the government, which is kind of obviously factually incorrect.
00:50:38.200And I don't think it's helpful for a civilization.
00:50:41.280Yeah, but I think it's critical to the massification and globalization.
00:50:46.380If you want to spread your managerial apparatus beyond the border states, you're going to need that.
00:50:51.820And I think that's why, for instance, you know, I always bring this up to people, and they never like it.
00:50:57.020You know, the more the franchise has been expanded, the larger the American government has gotten, and that correlation is very obvious, and yet no one seems to make it.
00:51:06.020They keep thinking that that's the thing that's supposed to restrict government when it does exactly the opposite.
00:51:11.280But yeah, I've been listening to Daryl Cooper's series on the creation of Israel.
00:51:17.560That's been pretty wild, and I knew some of that history, but not enough of it.
00:51:43.260We're going to move over to the question of the people.
00:51:45.160Before we do that, I just remind you, if you haven't checked out The Blind on The Blaze, it's the story of Phil Robinson.
00:51:51.300He's, of course, the founder of the Duck Dynasty clan, and it's a movie about his story of redemption.
00:51:56.060Obviously, he's part of The Blaze crew, but we didn't make that movie, so we can't actually give it away as part of Blaze TV.
00:52:02.960But if you want to go ahead and buy it through The Blaze so you don't have to buy it on Amazon or Apple or something, you can go ahead and do that through the platform.
00:52:48.200Well, that is the original conception of the United States of America, and it's weird how we almost don't even think of the words the United States.
00:52:56.480We just think of, like, USA, you know, or United States even just rolls off your tongue as the name of a country.
00:53:01.540I would argue that I think the United States of America became a nation at a certain point.
00:53:08.980I'm not sure we still are one now, but I certainly think a nation is kind of like a marriage.
00:53:16.820If it exists in your head to you, then it's real, and if it doesn't, then it's not real anymore.
00:53:22.300You know, that's all that really keeps it going.
00:53:50.060And if somebody came and attacked Hawaii, there would be no hesitation for someone from Tennessee to say, I've been attacked, I'm at war, we're going to war now.
00:54:00.420I think that that has greatly deteriorated over the last few years.
00:54:06.820I don't know if we could describe ourselves as truly one nation anymore.
00:54:10.200Yeah, I think post-World War II, for sure.
00:54:13.660You have that moment where everyone's gone to war, and you have mass communication through radio and television.
00:54:20.840You, very importantly, have mass curriculums in school.
00:54:23.940And however we both probably feel about public education, it is a binding cultural phenomenon.
00:54:30.540And I think that's probably, you know, that kind of 30 or 40 year span there post-World War II is where you actually have America, the nation, really be a thing.
00:54:41.960There's actually a monoculture for the first time, because I think before that, you know, you really were so spread out.
00:54:48.580You know, everything from the Articles of Confederation to, you know, the Civil War are obviously a desire to centralize and turn America more into a nation than a collection of individual states.
00:55:00.320But I think that's the first time where culture really fuses.
00:55:03.520And then, you know, it just starts getting deconstructed in the 60s or 70s.
00:55:07.800And it didn't last very long, unfortunately.
00:56:00.520Well, Cortate here says, how does the USSR dissolve not or dissolving not disprove power theory that you can't destroy power or cast the ring in the Mount Doom?
00:56:10.600Even if power was dispersed back to smaller countries, I don't see the the conflict with liberties.
00:56:20.260OK, so how does the destruction of the USSR not disprove power?
00:56:24.700The theory that power can't be destroyed.
00:56:32.620You weren't actually removing the fact that someone was in charge.
00:56:36.860Yes, you're right that the larger empire did disassemble into smaller states or even oligarchic actors.
00:56:43.720But those actors are still exercising state like power.
00:56:47.420So, I mean, is the argument that you can is the argument of kind of the retention of sovereignty that you can never, you know, have it move down to smaller units?
00:57:02.180But the idea that you completely remove it, I think, is incorrect.
00:57:06.140But perhaps, Dave, I'm assuming Dave has a different theory on that.
00:57:11.180Well, I suppose there could be an argument made that, like, OK, if you can, you know, like if you can move it down, you can move it much, much further down.
00:57:19.660Or where exactly does it stop that you can't continue?
00:57:22.540In other words, if people can secede and secede and secede, where is the limit where that stops?
00:57:26.980And why couldn't it go down to the individual?
00:57:29.200Well, the fact is, truthfully speaking, I'm much less concerned with arguing whether we will achieve true anarcho-capitalism.
00:57:38.840I see it much more as like the North Star that you want to be moving toward.
00:57:42.820You want more liberty and less centralized control.
00:57:46.200But certainly, I do think that it is, I mean, look, you could use the founding of the United States.
00:57:53.880However, Curtis Yarvin might feel about the Revolutionary War.
00:57:57.360The fact is, it was fought and they did defeat the most powerful empire of all time.
00:58:01.400And something that would have been seemingly impossible only a few years earlier, where there was this secession of the United States of America from the British Empire.
00:58:10.160And so, yeah, there's been lots of examples of that throughout history.
00:58:13.220And there's just lots of examples of awful government programs that have been abolished.
00:58:17.120Not as many as there should be, but there certainly have been a lot.
00:58:20.460And so as long as we know we can do that, I'm for trying to abolish more of them.
00:58:24.980So I think the one difference that might exist between us is that I understand power is a function of a number of things, but importantly, technology.
00:58:36.200And I think that the state, both through social and classical technology, has gained the ability to centralize in a way that it never would have before.
00:58:46.220I think that once that happens, all states have to scramble for this powers and arms race.
00:58:51.600And, you know, if you're if the guy next to you gets the Levee en masse, you have to get the Levee en masse.
00:58:55.500And if he builds nukes, you've got to build nukes.
00:58:57.480And if you don't, you're just going to get wiped out because that's how great power politics works.
00:59:01.620And so, you know, for a long time, technology has kind of facilitated the growth of power.
00:59:07.960We might be getting to a point where that stops.
00:59:10.100I think we are actually getting to a point where the complexity of society is actually a drag on it rather than a bonus to power.
00:59:19.020And I think eventually we will see states disassemble themselves simply because they can't maintain kind of the technology that allows them to stay larger.
00:59:28.040I mean, Yarvin's I don't know how deep you are in any of Yarvin's writings, but but one of his ideas was basically these kind of tiny Singapore is everywhere.
00:59:36.300Right. The technology gets us to the point where that rather than having vast states, it actually advances us to the point where we can have smaller states again.
00:59:43.360But that that kind of requires us to get, I think, through like a certain point where technology growing this the size of the state is no longer profitable to those in power.
01:00:23.640Well, look, I mean, there's been some like they've had some good local wins.
01:00:27.180I was actually just on the phone with Michael Heiss recently where he was talking about like, you know, like local mayors and sheriffs and stuff like that, where they've had some some electoral success.
01:00:35.480I see the Libertarian Party nationally, as I've always seen it as being a like a messaging outlet.
01:01:20.020An organization goes woke and then is de-woke-ified.
01:01:23.480And I think that is, I mean, I'm sure you could point to one little pocket here or there, but largely that is the case.
01:01:29.520And I think that whether, you know, like you're not a Libertarian, and I'm sure a lot of people in your audience aren't.
01:01:36.360But if you do know anything about, like, the tradition of Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Lou Rockwell and Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul and all of these, like, kind of great Libertarian thinkers, like, it's just such a disgrace to them that they would ever be lumped in with the woke insanity of what these kind of Beltway Libertarians have done to that name today.
01:01:55.400I've made this case so often from, you know, you, Tom Woods, all these guys who I get along with.
01:02:16.560And like, there's, but you also can't just always be retreating or otherwise we would just say, all right, the word woman has lost its meaning.
01:02:23.840Let's get, let's give it up and let that mean.
01:02:26.020It's like, no, like woman was a good fight to pick because you're like, no, screw that.