The Anarchist Moment

Every time something chaotic and violent happens, like the ghoulishly grinning Luigi Mangione murdering the UnitedHealthcare CEO in Midtown Manhattan, I worry people will leap to calling it emblematic of “anarchy”—not just in the loose sense that makes that word sometimes a synonym for randomness and upheaval but in the more formal political sense, which should be reserved for instances of people living peacefully without rulers (the meaning of the term).

It doesn’t help that nowadays so many anarchists are themselves idiots more interested in stymieing capitalism, even in the anodyne sense of voluntary commerce, than they are in shrinking the state.

If anarchy is liberty, not mere violence, you’ll find less anarchy in acts of vandalism or murder than in moments of political defiance—even in such unlikely moments as Eric Adams, mayor of the very city where the CEO murder occurred, hinting in a speech that he might be as comfortable running for reelection as a Republican as on the Democratic ticket. “Cancel me. I’m for America,” as he put it with Trump-era audacity.

Trumpism isn’t anarchism, but each of those two modes of defiance at least has the gumption to combat multiple would-be masters at the same time. Conventional anarchists would say they can darn well fight against government and capitalism at the same time, while anarcho-capitalists like me would suggest they stick almost entirely to getting rid of government, every human being deserving to have his property as well as his body left unassailed. The smartest of the Trump-era populists, by contrast, see themselves fighting against a civilization-wrecking form of progressivism that has three main institutional hydra-heads: government, media, and the academy.

By that three-pronged measure, the really good news this month is that Paul Krugman is retiring. He’s simultaneously an advocate of big government, a leading propagandist at the disgraceful New York Times, and a professor of economics (his Nobel in that field, it’s always worth remembering, being awarded not for his socialistic hackwork but for his long-ago advocacy of the benefits of trade between nations, the one subject on which he actually has a better grip than Trump does).

Krugman’s also something of a living insult to science and science fiction, having admitted that from an early age he dreamt of being Hari Seldon, the Isaac Asimov character who believes he can algorithmically predict and shape the future of the galaxy. That kind of hubris we don’t need in the real world, as I think Asimov understood.

For as long as classical liberalism has existed, about 300 years now, there has been a tension—I see it in myself—between the anarchist’s desire to cast aside all rules along with the rulers and the bean-counting, Manchester School economist’s desire to work things out neatly like multiplication tables to ensure everyone gets fed and no one’s insurance bills are unpaid, not even Luigi Mangione’s mom’s. No system’s perfect, and it hurts to admit that.

Getting as close as I could ask to balancing those two impulses—completely liberating everyone and maximizing general welfare—are the fine folks at Reason magazine, and their November issue was entirely composed of very short articles arguing, succinctly and pragmatically, for combing through the federal government, agency by inefficient agency, to “Abolish Everything.” (Let us hope Musk and Ramaswamy’s waste-cutting consultancy project D.O.G.E. is watching, especially with the U.S. government $36 trillion in debt and Trump showing no past aversion to deficit spending.)

Even faced with a proclamation such as that Reason title, though, there remains room for anarchist grousing. So many political evils, I become more convinced with age, thrive because of the plateau effect of thinking, “Well, close enough, can’t be too idealistic, best not to sound like an extremist, maybe next year, etc.” But that’s no way for a tiny, fringe movement to alter the world. If we don’t make the implicit explicit, no one will. And for consistent libertarians, the implicit is the idea that if each aspect of government would be better off abolished or privatized, then why not abolish them all simultaneously? Why not get rid of government? Why not anarchism?

The impulse among many respectable, mainstream, Reason-style libertarians for several decades now has been to tamp down talk of anarchism—to tamp down all sorts of potentially embarrassing radicalism. Past Reason editors-in-chief Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch wrote of “The Libertarian Moment” arriving way back in 2008 even as Welch worried that Ron Paul and Rand Paul were pulling the movement so far to the right that it’d take 20 years to recover its reputation. Current editor-in-chief Katherine Mangu-Ward generated some undue hate from the rising Paul-loving parts of the movement a couple of years later simply by observing with some friendly, perhaps condescending amusement that Ron Paul wasn’t going to win a presidential election. Not her wish, just an observation.

But here’s the thing: perhaps the best defense Mangu-Ward could’ve mounted against the rank and file types who then suspected her of insufficient radicalism is that she was, at least when I first met her in the early-2000s, a full-on anarcho-capitalist, then fresh from Yale. I don’t know precisely where she stands now, but the single most interesting line in that whole Reason issue, from my perspective, is the line in her intro essay that begins, “We aren’t making the case for anarchism (at least at the moment).”

The glass-half-empty interpretation of that line would be that the “moment” for avoiding the promotion of anarchism has gone on for decades at Reason (and the mainstream libertarian movement in general) and likely will never end. The moment for talking about dispensing with government as an organizing premise for civilization will somehow never arrive.

Then again, Reason, and the rest of the libertarian movement—or even its allies in adjacent movements such as populism—declaring 2025, with D.O.G.E. in the news and governing elites reviled all over the globe, the “anarchist moment” would be no more absurd or self-defeating than was declaring 2008 (in the midst of record spending on both war and welfare) a possible “libertarian moment.”

As Gillespie and Welch made that bold proclamation, back in the real world, dominant neoconservatives were in the process of handing off the baton of rule to rising progressives. That didn’t make idealistic libertarians wrong in the eyes of eternity. An affirmation of anarchism wouldn’t be wrong now, either.

After all, I’ve been waiting patiently for such declarations to be made openly and unapologetically since back around 1989 when I read works about anarchism, whether fully supportive of the idea or not, by Robert Nozick and the Friedmans. How much longer must we wait for that denied and deferred anarchist moment?

—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey