12 Sep The Citizen’s Two-Front War

The term anarcho-tyranny first appears with the conservative writer Samuel Francis, who draws on a notion from Carl Schmitt to explain a situation where a government can at once be hyper-authoritarian with regard to everyday citizens and utterly inept in dealing with true criminal elements. He published his definitive articulation of the idea in a 1994 article in Chronicles, where he describes the experience of anarcho-tyranny in tedious length. Francis identifies the unique status of the United States in qualifying as an anarcho-tyranny. He writes that “the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duty of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect its failures do bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy.” At the same exact time, he argues, “that semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state.” The outcome, which we may well experience for ourselves each day, is the only civilization to ever exist which could give us the 2020 Summer of Rage: a government capable of enforcing mask mandates and business shutdowns, but incapable of preventing widespread riots, looting and ultimately a month-long autonomous zone in a major population center (CHOP). In Francis’ own time he had plenty of examples to choose from in the 1990s.

We can recognize Francis and Schmitt before him as giving people permission to discuss the issue but neither submits a satisfactory explanation of why it happens. Perhaps this owes to the name Francis gives to the condition. The phrase anarcho-tyranny connotes the feeling quite well: the everyday law-abiding person faces the paradox of a state which seeks to accuse him, and through costly court processes and the executive branch’s profusion of documents often succeeds; the state also cannot guarantee that basic services of governance can be depended upon, such as convenient registration of a vehicle or removing a misplaced lien on their property, much less enforcing their property rights or prosecuting neighborhood criminals. The phrase does not however explain how the citizen becomes enveloped in such a two-front war, one against a hostile state presence and one against a hostile criminal presence. The best that Francis offered, to my knowledge, is from his 1994 article:

But there is also another reason why anarcho-tyranny flourishes. Throughout this century, in tandem with the emergence of the leviathan state, there has occurred a managed pacification and manipulation of the citizens, with the result that Americans are increasingly habituated to an entirely passive role in government, economy, culture, and now even basic social functions such as childrearing and health care. This process of pacification is closely related to the managerial revolution in the United States and the emergence of centralized, technically skilled elites that specialize in the usurpation of previously autonomous social functions. Hence, just as Americans in the mass-managerial regime are dependent on mass corporations, offices, and factories for their livelihoods, just as they are dependent on mass corporations, offices, and factories for their livelihoods, just as they are dependent on political parties and illusory mass participation in the political process, just as they are dependent on and engulfed by the mass culture that is continuously fed to them in spectator sports, television, film, art, music, and popular literature, and just as in all these dimensions of life Americans increasingly surrender the active and participatory roles that republican government demands, so too in anarcho-tyranny we are habituated to an entirely passive role in securing our protection from criminals. (Francis, “Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A.”, 1994).

I believe he makes an earnest attempt to identify the issue, but Francis does not clearly establish how the situation arises and persists. He proffers a narrative which could easily slot into the overarching stories told by liberal democrats, and in some sense this is derived from their stories. This is why for instance Francis at one point defends a man caught in a sting operation for acquiring pedophilic materials. The basis for the defense is not that the man did no wrong, but that his government sought to accuse him and found the means to do it, by exploiting a vice in potentia. I would contend that this reveals something about the above narrative. Blame cannot be necessarily foisted upon a managerial sector or a hapless, mollified mass of voters. This could only be argued if one first held Max Weber’s views of society, civilization and statecraft. In other words, one needs to be a liberal to credit the situation to the ambiguous laxity of the victims, and the insecure zeal of the perpetrators.

It is a great irony that the same issues described by the domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski in his manifesto Industrial Society and its Future similarly posit the same causes for the same experiences. Kaczynski argued in similar terms: industrial society cannot satisfy basic needs and rights, it enforces its claim through shows of force, people develop psychological problems as a result and finally the social condition becomes a psychosis within which we must participate without alternative. Kaczynski identifies the same basic progression of states into acquiring power, political management of power, withdrawal from their primary responsibilities and the resulting social condition for the average person requiring a two-minded approach to his adversaries. This should cause us some pause, and force us to reevaluate how much liberalism factors into these explanations.

I would liken the present condition as a society-wide criminalization of citizenship. The average American citizen without much exaggeration has an existence not too dissimilar to a criminal in a mafia or gangster film. The appeal of these dramas goes beyond their excitement or pace; the average citizen much like these films competes against not one, but two powerful enemies. He or she must face up against actual violent criminal elements every day in order to get by, while not far behind lingers a monolithic state which interrupts and immediately halts the progression of one’s destiny. For me and for you, this pans out in less dramatic or theatrical circumstances. It looks less like Act II shootouts and police helicopters, and more like avoiding certain neighborhoods and feeling intense fear when questioned by police at a traffic stop. It is the knowledge that if you wake up to find your car with a smashed window, that the person responsible for the damage and the theft of goods from your vehicle will never be caught even if you file a police report. It is also the knowledge that there is no benefit to talking to a police officer without a lawyer present, and that police interrogators tell their children to never talk to the police without a lawyer.

Our two-front war is not downstream of a liberal narrative because this situation is caused by liberalism itself. If we assume the purpose of the law is to prevent certain undesirable behaviors, we are ensnared in the liberal net. If we assume a criminal is a separate species from non-criminals, under a wider genus of ‘citizens,’ we are liberals. If at any point in explaining the role of a state we utter the words contract or violence, we have ceded the entire foundation of our political philosophy to liberalism. It is interesting that law today is exclusively a civil term. Common law and even natural law, despite their prominent role in higher courts, have almost no indication of existence in the legislation or execution of the law. This is because there is no common law or natural law in liberalism. Laws are constructs derived from mutual consent or perhaps a nebulous sense of rights. The idea of justice then has little to no bearing over liberal policy, because there is no justice outside of what the state can deliver. The contradiction is eminent when the courts or law enforcement miscarry justice and do something unthinkably convoluted to fulfill their role, but for every other instance a tacit indifference is secured throughout society because of the diminishment of law in man.

The political determination however has an anthropological basis. It is the inner contradiction of liberalism that manifests, and tears open, Immanuel Kant’s philosophy: The individual is a passive recipient from the collective, and the collective is nothing without the will of the concrete individual. This is the simultaneous assertion that man is inherently fallen because he is finite and that he is inherently exalted because he is capable of infinite progress. This binds us to the modern categories of solidarity and defilement. Humanity as a general concept requires us to recognize all people with a fraternity and comradery defying anything concrete: I have as much responsibility to the least well-off in my society as my own kin. Humans have an infinite dignity, infinite value, infinite potential and infinite opportunity for change. Humanity also can be easily lost, hence the category of defilement. The concrete is the means of such defilement. When one makes evident some interior prejudice, discontent or commitment not copasetic with the liberal paradigm, this occasions a stamp of defilement which bars one from the category of solidarity. Such defilement and embarrassment even befalls victims by no fault of their own, as when a person is on the receiving end of violence or evident wrong. The person is permanently branded as having been injured and stained by this evil, with the uncleanness requiring ritual purification. Acts against liberal orders usually require a self-flagellation, a commitment to infinite progress and a period of temporary separation as one would expect from a leper. Injuries sustained by a person become ‘trauma’ or something of the like, and must be ritually rendered inert though protocols like therapy or ‘processed’ by infinite progress to the ideal. In either case the person is never relieved of the impurity entirely and they simply must endure it, sometimes even after death.

I believe this is the source for the current arrangement of ‘anarcho-tyranny,’ and it becomes clear when we observe these categories in action. A visceral instance is sexual violence against women. Women in the United States must navigate between several conflicting narratives. Women are told they are more or less exchangeable with any man in both their physical and mental capacities, but that they are also more at risk for violence and trauma because of systemic issues. Women are also told that they ought to feel safe and at liberty at all times, that fear is not warranted and may even be a vice; but also that certain places, times and people are forbidden to them as women. There are many others, but the dichotomy is between the sexless Ideal and the tragic Reality within which they exist. The task before women then is to identify the relationship between the abstract Ideal and the concrete Reality, which is obviously the monumental burden which has been the principal task of philosophy since the Pre-Socratics. No person can be expected to solve this on their own, and so women frequently favor what is more polite or socially permissible. This is why many women are frequently quick to insist that generalizations are not always accurate (favoring the concrete), and that they assume the best intentions in people (favoring the abstract). Women for their part pay a horrible price for this in that applying the wrong dimension to a situation can cause them extreme harm. A woman who has accepted certain premises about her own capabilities and about the nature of people around her can be subject to violence, humiliation and psychological torment.

The upshot to all this is in the consequences. The responsible party for these actions can usually expect to pay in some obtuse and uncalculated way that does not suffice to be called justice. The man still benefits from the category of solidarity because he can always change or reform, and even in the case that he becomes ‘defiled’ and classed as a criminal he is unlikely to reform, because he likely did not care about such categories in the first place; if he doesn’t participate in society in the first place, such social consequences mean little to him. Meanwhile the woman is permanently branded by her own category of defilement, both in an interior ‘trauma’ that must be expelled through the religious practice of therapy, and in the insistence that this is an indelible stain which cannot be removed from her personal history. She will be forced to inform every potential mate about this humiliation, incited by nothing on her end, and moreover she must going forward recognize herself in this victimization. Because of the punitive nature of defilement, she is almost certain to view herself as having done something wrong in sustaining this injury. It should go without saying this is an immense and systemic evil.

All of this is possible only because the natural law, and its derivation in common law, are either absorbed into civic law or cast aside. States cannot routinely enforce the common law or prioritize natural law. This is indeed because of the liberal managerial state in part. States require extensive documentation of crimes to prosecute them successfully, justice is extremely expensive and ultimately most crimes that are violations of natural law are simply too difficult to pursue. Murder is perhaps the biggest exception, but it is only seriously investigated due to the severity of its social disruption. Indeed the sociopolitical dimension of the law is its greatest weakness and the cause of ‘anarcho-tyranny.’ Violations of natural law like defrauding wage laborers, sodomy, taking advantage of the poor and petty theft are admittedly not that evidently destabilizing. Even in the case of murder, if it can be safely neglected without causing an immediate reaction from the public it is sure to be neglected. Aborted pregnancies and street violence in major cities fall under this classification.

Meanwhile the state has ample opportunity and desire to create laws out of political and sentimental appetites, and the authority of the state is powerfully asserted in the indictment of individuals over these crimes. Trespassing on government property and making malicious or unsavory comments on the Internet can earn worse outcomes than violent criminal activity, on account of both the liberal solidarity aforementioned as well as the greater demands placed on enforcing civil, rather than natural, law. Sting operations, RICO charges and federal intervention therefore have a placating function in pursuing crime, perhaps ‘before it happens’ but also in escalating the civil law to crack down on what it cannot otherwise prosecute.

Unlike Sam Francis, I do not see ‘anarcho-tyranny’ as being a uniquely American phenomenon. Unlike Carl Schmitt, I do not think this is strictly an effect of perverse political ventures. I believe the citizen’s two front war is on account of his being a citizen, which makes him enemies with both his state and his fellow citizens that are uncitizenly. This is not therefore a problem with one kind of modern government but rather with liberalism itself, and so long as liberalism survives it shall bear the toxic fruit we must taste each day.