[The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies. by Auron Macintyre, Regnery 2024; 173 pp.]
Auron MacIntyre is the host of a popular podcast on BlazeTV, on which he interviews guests, most—but not all—of whom share his “organic conservative” perspective. He often has valuable things to say, and his defense against “woke” tyranny merits great praise. Auron MacIntyre is not a man to “trim his sails to the wind,” and for that he deserves our gratitude. He is a beacon of light in an age of conformity. In this week’s column, though, I’ll suggest that there is a problem with a good deal of his work, especially as this deals with weaknesses of free market libertarianism. His standard method is to summarize the ideas of an eminent right-wing author, often stressing one of his books. He proves himself an able expositor who can skillfully elicit the insights of his chosen author. However, he does not argue rigorously, but rather offers the ideas of his authors as if it were evident that they should be accorded great weight.
The basic argument of the book can be put in this way: In the European Middle Ages, the king was not the sole source of power in a state. People had independent sources of authority, particularly the Catholic Church and the local nobles. The Enlightenment changed that by eliminating—or, at any rate, reducing—the independence of sources of authority independent from the state. People no longer needed protection from the state, since the state was now “all of us,” (i.e., people who live in a democratic republic). (The existence of a monarch did not gainsay this.) Additionally, individuals had natural rights, based on natural law, which was held to be universally binding, independent from local custom and tradition. Applied to the United States, people relied on a rule-bound understanding of the Constitution, wrongly believing that separation of powers and checks and balances could be applied mechanically.
What this view disregards is that the people in control of the state want to get as much power and wealth as possible, and, to that end, propagandize people so that they will accept what the state wants as their own wish also. To do this, it uses a class of intellectuals to influence public opinion. These intellectuals become part of the state themselves and seek to advance their own power and wealth. People must be blocked from access to sources of information that convey other messages and, in recent years, this has been done by pressure on social media like Facebook and YouTube to marginalize these other messages. Often those in control of the mass media do not need much in the way of pressure, since they agree with the state’s perspective. Indeed, they may be considered part of the state themselves.
Although MacIntyre’s perspective has considerable plausibility, he wrongly applies it to libertarian advocates of the free market, who want to eliminate all state interference with the market, if not do away with the state altogether. He sees business as controlled by a class of managers, who manipulate people to accept the products they manufacture, rather than what they genuinely need. Libertarians make another mistake: they think that we can do without the notion of sovereignty. This is a mistake, because in emergencies, rules always have to be suspended, and we have a better chance of preserving liberty if the people recognize that the fact the state is “democratic” does not suffice to identify the state with themselves.
As suggested above, a difficulty with MacIntyre’s way of proceeding is that he does not rigorously argue for his contentions, but instead summarizes a book. Almost all of what he says about the class of managers running corporations and the state comes from James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. As Burnham saw matters, the separation of ownership and control in the modern corporation meant that managers no longer were bound by their fiduciary duty to the company’s shareholders. But, as Ludwig von Mises has taught us, so long as the owners can transfer their shares elsewhere, they retain ultimate control of the company. So far as the claim that the companies create demand for their products through advertising is concerned, one wonders how the companies contrive to do this. Wouldn’t it be easier to offer the products and services people actually want, rather than to endeavor to create a demand for products that doesn’t exist? This whole notion was criticized by F.A. Hayek in his classic paper, “The Non Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect’,” to which I refer readers interested for further details.
In his thinking about emergencies and sovereignty, Macintyre has been influenced by the controversial German jurist and Nazi Party member Carl Schmitt, who argued in The Concept of the Political that the sovereign is he who has the power to declare an exception (i.e., a state of emergency in which the rules are suspended). But why can’t people cope with emergencies as they arise, without specified procedures on what to do? Why do people need to involve the state at all, particularly when, as Macintyre is aware of and indeed emphasizes, those who declare emergencies are reluctant, to say the least, to give up their extra-constitutional powers? As he says about covid, “The experts who had locked down the entire country were drunk on the incredible power they had amassed in the space of only a few months and had no interest in letting it go.”
Schmitt mocked “liberals” who shunned the existential struggle of friend against enemy and sought instead the abolition of “the political” in his sense in order that they could attain peace and prosperity through the free exchange of goods in mutually beneficial trade. To some of us, this remains an appealing vision, regardless of what Schmitt and MacIntyre, following Schmitt, think.
