Bitarch’s Column
While reading Aleksei Shustov’s book “After the State”, I came across an interesting thought:
“Such ‘choices’ [the choice of ECU], obviously, provide a fundamentally different level of freedom and ensure real justice compared to choices in a majority democracy. The latter does not take into account individual differences and forces everyone to live by the rules of the majority. After all, if one person feels great in a system with broad independence and high responsibility, while another prefers social security and is ready for high taxes, then either one or the other will inevitably be oppressed in their self-realization.”
The author of this book cannot be called a libertarian in any way. Perhaps he had not even heard the word when he wrote his book. He arrived at the idea of panarchy purely from an understanding of the destructiveness of the “majority democracy” model, which has now become synonymous with the word “state.” Accordingly, he looks at the world impartially. Unlike many libertarian authors, Shustov takes into account the demands of broad layers of the population, whom some ideological libertarians contemptuously call “lefties.”
Be realistic — such people are the majority even in Switzerland, which is “ideal” for many libertarians. Active attempts to promote minarchist ideas did not yield tangible results even with full freedom of choice and huge funding. Let alone Russia, with its paternalistic mentality and impoverished population.
As can be seen from the quote from the book, a “lefty” will feel oppressed under minarchism and will offer the maximum possible resistance to the ruling party (most likely, simply not allowing the libertarian party to come to power). From the perspective of a conditional “average Joe,” minarchism is a certain form of “liberal fascism” — where liberal values are forcibly imposed on people who wish to live under paternalism (since under minarchism, courts hold a territorial monopoly, and laws are mandatory throughout the state’s territory).
It turns out that in the eyes of voters, minarchists will look exactly as “lefties” look in the eyes of libertarians. As a libertarian, would you vote for a “lefty” proposing to impose ideas of social justice on the whole society? I don’t think so. And will a “lefty,” seeing that you propose to impose the exact opposite on the whole society, vote for you? I don’t think so either. Given that the majority of society supports at least some form of social support, the electoral chances of minarchists tend toward zero. Many of them do not want to acknowledge this fact and begin to hint at the usefulness of applying physical violence against their opponents (“Pinochet’s helicopter tours”), showing that in their methods of struggling for power, they will not be inferior even to their extreme ideological opponents — the Stalinists.
To achieve electoral success, any libertarian party must either become a kind of “people’s party,” attracting people from as wide a spectrum of views as possible, or form a bloc with a left-wing party based on a shared agenda, which is somewhat harder to imagine. Perhaps the LPR should discard the idea of imposing liberal values and change its program from minarchist to panarchist? As history shows, the chances of success for such a program are very high (with it, Abraham Kuyper won the elections in the Netherlands — read the article on pillarization).
