The Philosopher Behind the Project 2025-Trump Regime
The Karl Marx of Libertarianism
The Libertarian Manifesto (more or less)
A specter is haunting America— the specter of Libertarianism. All the Powers of Government have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter.
The Libertarians disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the working classes tremble at a Libertarian revolution. The capitalists have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
RICH PEOPLE OF AMERICA UNITE!
Is my parody too hyperbolic? Sadly, no. We can see this extreme attitude in today’s tech bros such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. We can also see this specter and revolution being enacted into literal law by the new presidential regime’s Project 2025 agenda.
The new Washington regime is a right-wing takeover of a government and a nation. Specifically, the takeover was planned by the Libertarian Heritage Foundation, a plan the seeds of of which began in the early 1970s. The Heritage Foundation is the primary force behind Project 2025.
(Portions of this article are taken from my philosophy textbook: How We Are and How We Got Here.)
Most people have heard of Project 2025, but few people know of the philosopher who helped inspire and shape this Libertarian movement. American Robert Nozick (1938–2002), was a revolutionary in the true sense of the word. Like Karl Marx, Nozick tried not to describe society but to change it. Nozick sought to transform the understanding of freedom and the individual within the state. He was right only in the sense of being right wing. His understanding of the nature of freedom and what it means to be a person in community is fundamentally incorrect.
Nozick didn’t invent the ideology of Libertarianism, but he gave it intellectual justification. On their surface, Nozick’s arguments sound good, but like most arguments within analytic philosophy, Nozick’s arguments are disconnected from real-world evidence. Not that the lack of reality has dissuaded Libertarians from adopting his philosophy — a parallel with Marxists adopting Marx’s philosophy. Project 2025 is the right wing’s most concerted effort to date to install Nozick’s political philosophy in the United States and inflict it on its citizens.
Nozick the Revolutionary Against Equality Under the Law
No philosopher ever works in a vacuum, and Nozick was no different. In his book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), he expressed his sharp disagreements with the philosopher John Rawls. In 1971, Rawls had written A Theory of Justice in which he argued that freedom and equality can be integrated into a unity when we see that justice is a matter of fairness.
In Rawls’s version of ideal theory, he said that if we logically think about what we want society to be, we would agree that an ideal society should have adequate structures to ensure basic rights and freedoms for all. We would never agree to a society in which one sex, race, age, or any other property that a person could possess would entitle that person to more rights than people without that property would have. An ideal, just society, for Rawls, would be one that is based solely on a rational, fair implementation of the good without regard to hierarchical divisions. The only logical choice for us, Rawls said, is a society that guarantees equal justice under the law for everyone.
Nozick agreed with the importance of justice but not equality. Nozick objected to Rawls’s idea that justice should consider the well-being of those who are worse off, Rawls having argued that lifting up those who are worse off benefits everyone in society. Nozick counters that those who are well-off have no obligation to assist others for the sake of bettering society.
Nozick based his argument on the idea of inviolable natural rights for individuals, an idea that can be traced back to the time of John Locke. From this idea, Nozick states that an individual can do whatever he or she wants as long as he or she respects the rights of others. But what “respect” means for Nozick is the respect for the right to “positive freedom” — to do whatever they want. He makes the extraordinary claim that any behavior is allowed as long as compensation is paid for any damage caused to others. Critics have pointed out that such a view favors those with greater financial resources.
Nozick offers a modified version of John Locke’s social contract in which people agree to the convenience of a state. In Nozick’s vision of utopia, the only role for the state is to defend the rights of individuals. Nozick also adopts a strict version of Locke’s labor theory of property; Nozick claims that acquisition of property creates an inviolable right of the individual to do whatever he or she wants with that property. He offers no means to correct abuses of property acquisition, only a suggestion that such abuses are wrong but wouldn’t happen in an ideal society.
Nozick’s Minarchist State
Nozick arrives at a tamer version of Hobbes’s state of nature, but Nozick’s is made less nasty and brutish by a minarchist state — a government with only minimal powers to enforce the law. A state is preferable to anarchy (the absence of all government and normative order) in that it can protect individuals’ rights, mainly property and financial rights. Throughout his philosophy, Nozick favors the assumption that those who are well-off acquired their property justly and are thus justified in their wealth. Nozick thus rejects all ideas of social welfare, equates taxation with theft, and even frowns on nongovernmental efforts to promote greater social equality.
Nozick’s book has been cemented into the foundation of the political ideology of libertarianism, an extremist view that there should be no government at all. Libertarianism has a social component and an economic component. In social theory, libertarianism states that individuals should have complete freedom to do whatever they want as long as they are not aggressive or coercive toward others. This view is similar to the views of John Stuart Mill, who was a nonanalytic liberal. Most libertarians reject the idea of positive human rights (“I have a right to . . . ”), believing instead in negative rights (“no one has the right to coerce me”).
In economic theory, libertarianism rejects governmental regulation of business. One branch of this theory, anarcho-capitalism, states that corporations should be allowed to create their own private enforcement agencies to defend their property rights. Nozick had said that the minarchist state was preferable to anarchy, but libertarianism generally prefers anarchy to the state.
Many analytic political philosophers, including libertarians, accept the view of economic liberalism — the theory that economic activity is governed by laws similar to the way in which the motion of bodies is governed by physical laws of motion. That view has its roots in Adam Smith, a friend of David Hume and the “father of capitalism.” Recent versions of economic liberalism include the idea that human society, especially government, should not interfere with the natural processes of financial transactions. A milder form of libertarianism is known as “neoliberalism” or “corporatism,” which sees the role for government as protecting the interests of business corporations with only minimal oversight and regulation, but not the complete absence of government.
Project 2025 is the Libertarian project to establish Nozick’s minarchist state in the United States. The Project 2025 manifesto clearly, concretely, and without apology outlines a program to strip the US government of all powers except the power to protect the freedoms and property of the wealthiest. If they succeed, the US would become an anarchy for the über-rich and corporations in which they are free from regulation and accountability. Everyone else in the US would be part of the wrong end of a resegregated social hierarchy. Ideal for those on the top, not for the rest. It’s about power.
Nozick would probably approve. The Heritage Foundation, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel would definitely approve because that Libertarian “utopia” is what they paid for.
A white dude fuck gives us all a bad name.
Libertarianism collapses with the sound of a single word- externalities.