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Anarcho-Tyranny
In 1993, the governor of North Carolina made a big show out of enforcing a new seat belt law while he was, at the same time, releasing convicted criminals from prison who had committed a far more serious crime. This combination of government overreach and leniency created “anarcho-tyranny,” according conservative intellectual Sam Francis, which he described in 1994 as “a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety.”
Francis goes on in his essay, titled “Anarcho-Tyranny, USA,” to conclude that the solution to lawlessness is for more citizens to buy handguns and take the law into their own hands, and in later writings, Francis embraces racialism. We believe more police, greater deterrence, and incentives are the main solutions to crime and disorder, not private gun ownership. And we reject Francis’ racism unreservedly.
But Francis’ concept of “anarcho-tyranny” depends neither on vigilantism nor racism. It describes well the policies and measures of Democrats and other liberal leaders across the Western world. Indeed, it does so more today than it did 30 years ago when Chronicles magazine first published it.
Consider this passage by Francis: “And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent. At the same time, the governor of North Carolina grotesquely fails to uphold his famous oath to protect the citizens of his state by keeping convicted felons in prison, he has no problem finding the time to organize a massive waste of his time and the taxpayers’ money to hound and humiliate a perfectly innocent citizen for the infraction of a trivial traffic law.”
What Francis did not get at was how much of anarcho-tyranny is driven by victimhood ideology. The reason Starmer wants to crack down on anti-immigrant rioters but not migrant rioters is because the latter are oppressed and the former oppressors. The same goes for why Walz refused to call out the National Guard on Black Lives Matter: black Americans are victims of historic oppression and thus stopping the riot would continue the oppression. And the same goes for why Newsom allowed violent crime to rise to levels 31% higher than the rest of the United States, and for homelessness to rise 40% since he took office: the people on the street are victims and so, to them, everything should be given and nothing required.
In the case of Covid, victimhood ideology played out as expected. The vaccinated, locked-down, and masked social distancers were the heroes seeking to save historically oppressed victims, while the unvaccinated, unmasked, and unlocked-down were the villains. It was heroic for people to narc out their neighbors on snitch lines and for President Joe Biden and his staff to demand greater social media censorship since, they believed, they were saving lives of the most vulnerable.
The professional-managerial class and the administrative and therapeutic state are overseeing the anarchic and tyrannical transition to Wokeism. Instead of policing the streets, governments are policing the Internet. Where there once were police, there are now social workers. Where people were once arrested for illegal camping and open drug use, they are today revived when they overdose, are given drug paraphernalia, and are increasingly supplied with the drugs to use. When there are no consequences for self-destructive behavior, a lot of medical care is required. Where the state once respected the right of parents to raise their own children, the administrative state is seeking increasing control. And when “hate” is identified as the “root cause” of “real-world harm,” there’s a lot of censoring to do.
Anarcho-tyranny can be thought of as the strategy for liberal politicians to impose Woke ideology on social institutions, from the universities and news media to the criminal justice and health care systems. Woke ideology is the inversion of the liberal Enlightenment ideology that has governed Western civilization for centuries. Instead of equal justice for all, the Woke are seeking a two-tiered system, one for the historically oppressed (e.g. non-whites, criminals) and the other for historical oppressors (e.g. whites, the police). Where Western elites in the past delivered greater public order and greater private liberty, the Woke are delivering greater public disorder, tyranny for those designated oppressors, and greater personal freedom for those designated oppressed.
In the end, the anarchy and chaos help justify the authoritarianism the illiberal Woke liberals seek. The politicians aren’t consciously creating chaos, much less plotting for how they will use it to impose ever-more draconian demands on society in general and historical oppressors in particular. Rather, the authoritarian uses of the chaos are natural extensions of their ideology, which they hold unquestioningly.
If black people or migrants are rioting, it’s the fault of society for being too oppressive, in the view of the Woke. As Walz said, “They told us last year. ‘Change cash bail.’ ‘Change how you do traffic stops.’ It didn't happen and look what we got.” The solution for the Woke is not to send in the National Guard or crack down on crime but rather to create snitch lines and blacklists, censor hate speech, and send police to arrest people for what they wrote on Facebook.
Liberals, Democrats, and progressives are rapidly replacing the old standard of equal justice under the law with the new Woke hierarchy of the oppressed, by which the more moral, higher status, and more powerful members of society are the ones who share the race, sex, and sexuality of the historically most oppressed members. Wokeism is inverting the ethical, spiritual, and symbolic system that is the foundation of Western civilization. There is no single law that we are equal under. There should be different rules for different people based on the racial and sexual moral hierarchy of Wokeism.
Wokeism that is driving the demand by elites for anarcho-tyranny rose from the nihilism created by the decline of religion. Without an ultimate basis for deciding what is right and wrong, good or evil, elites turned to hedonism, including through power-seeking and a highly simplified form of altruism, or compassion for the vulnerable, which is itself a way of wielding power. The heavy emphasis on compassion and caring in Christianity was tempered by an Old Testament commitment to equal justice under the law. Compassion unbound by Christian or Enlightenment morality became Wokeism, a morality that inverted historical power dynamics. And, in contrast to Christianity and Enlightenment liberalism, it denies rather than affirms individual human agency and responsibility.
Why did liberals become advocates of anarcho-tyranny? In part, their secularism and nihilism led them to embrace a highly simplistic inversion of Enlightenment values, including equal justice before the law, and impose it on society. Another reason was the growing power of the administrative state, which has sought to expand its influence over more domains of life, from the family to social media platforms.
Political Contradictions of Anarcho-Tyranny
The seeds and spouts of anarcho-tyranny were visible in the post war era through to Francis’s essay in 1994. But it took illiberal Wokeism’s conquering of liberalism and its implementation by Democratic politicians over the last ten years for it to bloom. Defenders of civilization have, over the last 50 years, achieved many remarkable victories, often by running against liberals on questions of law and order. But there’s no question that the trends in the 30 years since Francis’ essay have been toward greater anarcho-tyranny, not less. And if the drivers of it are indeed secularization and the rise of the administrative state, then we might see more, not less, anarcho-tyranny in the future.
The wild card remains politics and pragmatism. Most people like law and order, and personal liberty, at least for themselves. When forced to think about it, or compromise politically, many if not most on the Left embrace law and order and personal freedom for all. Violent crime is unpopular, and both Newsom and other Democratic politicians are at this moment in California cracking down on homeless encampments in order to protect their political dominance. Starmer is cracking down on riots. From a practical perspective, anarchy and chaos are unpopular. As such, left-wing politicians, including Walz, his running mate Kamala Harris, Newsom, Trudeau, Starmer, and their allies, are all vulnerable so long as the chaos continues.
Liberal support for authoritarian measures and policies and its defense of lawlessness for people designated victims and their descendants will either change or face defeat politically. Liberals can return to their historical opposition to authoritarianism or cede the issue to conservatives. Conservatives, who have traditionally placed a higher value on maintaining social order and upholding established hierarchies, may find an opportunity to pick up liberals and libertarians alienated by illiberal Wokeism. If antagonism between Left-Right goes from being liberal-conservative to illiberal-liberal one, the seemingly linear trend toward anarcho-tyranny could still reverse itself.
Anarcho-Tyranny
In 1993, the governor of North Carolina made a big show out of enforcing a new seat belt law while he was, at the same time, releasing convicted criminals from prison who had committed a far more serious crime. This combination of government overreach and leniency created “anarcho-tyranny,” according conservative intellectual Sam Francis, which he described in 1994 as “a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety.”
Francis goes on in his essay, titled “Anarcho-Tyranny, USA,” to conclude that the solution to lawlessness is for more citizens to buy handguns and take the law into their own hands, and in later writings, Francis embraces racialism. We believe more police, greater deterrence, and incentives are the main solutions to crime and disorder, not private gun ownership. And we reject Francis’ racism unreservedly.
But Francis’ concept of “anarcho-tyranny” depends neither on vigilantism nor racism. It describes well the policies and measures of Democrats and other liberal leaders across the Western world. Indeed, it does so more today than it did 30 years ago when Chronicles magazine first published it.
Consider this passage by Francis: “And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent. At the same time, the governor of North Carolina grotesquely fails to uphold his famous oath to protect the citizens of his state by keeping convicted felons in prison, he has no problem finding the time to organize a massive waste of his time and the taxpayers’ money to hound and humiliate a perfectly innocent citizen for the infraction of a trivial traffic law.”
What Francis did not get at was how much of anarcho-tyranny is driven by victimhood ideology. The reason Starmer wants to crack down on anti-immigrant rioters but not migrant rioters is because the latter are oppressed and the former oppressors. The same goes for why Walz refused to call out the National Guard on Black Lives Matter: black Americans are victims of historic oppression and thus stopping the riot would continue the oppression. And the same goes for why Newsom allowed violent crime to rise to levels 31% higher than the rest of the United States, and for homelessness to rise 40% since he took office: the people on the street are victims and so, to them, everything should be given and nothing required.
In the case of Covid, victimhood ideology played out as expected. The vaccinated, locked-down, and masked social distancers were the heroes seeking to save historically oppressed victims, while the unvaccinated, unmasked, and unlocked-down were the villains. It was heroic for people to narc out their neighbors on snitch lines and for President Joe Biden and his staff to demand greater social media censorship since, they believed, they were saving lives of the most vulnerable.
The professional-managerial class and the administrative and therapeutic state are overseeing the anarchic and tyrannical transition to Wokeism. Instead of policing the streets, governments are policing the Internet. Where there once were police, there are now social workers. Where people were once arrested for illegal camping and open drug use, they are today revived when they overdose, are given drug paraphernalia, and are increasingly supplied with the drugs to use. When there are no consequences for self-destructive behavior, a lot of medical care is required. Where the state once respected the right of parents to raise their own children, the administrative state is seeking increasing control. And when “hate” is identified as the “root cause” of “real-world harm,” there’s a lot of censoring to do.
Anarcho-tyranny can be thought of as the strategy for liberal politicians to impose Woke ideology on social institutions, from the universities and news media to the criminal justice and health care systems. Woke ideology is the inversion of the liberal Enlightenment ideology that has governed Western civilization for centuries. Instead of equal justice for all, the Woke are seeking a two-tiered system, one for the historically oppressed (e.g. non-whites, criminals) and the other for historical oppressors (e.g. whites, the police). Where Western elites in the past delivered greater public order and greater private liberty, the Woke are delivering greater public disorder, tyranny for those designated oppressors, and greater personal freedom for those designated oppressed.
In the end, the anarchy and chaos help justify the authoritarianism the illiberal Woke liberals seek. The politicians aren’t consciously creating chaos, much less plotting for how they will use it to impose ever-more draconian demands on society in general and historical oppressors in particular. Rather, the authoritarian uses of the chaos are natural extensions of their ideology, which they hold unquestioningly.
If black people or migrants are rioting, it’s the fault of society for being too oppressive, in the view of the Woke. As Walz said, “They told us last year. ‘Change cash bail.’ ‘Change how you do traffic stops.’ It didn't happen and look what we got.” The solution for the Woke is not to send in the National Guard or crack down on crime but rather to create snitch lines and blacklists, censor hate speech, and send police to arrest people for what they wrote on Facebook.
Liberals, Democrats, and progressives are rapidly replacing the old standard of equal justice under the law with the new Woke hierarchy of the oppressed, by which the more moral, higher status, and more powerful members of society are the ones who share the race, sex, and sexuality of the historically most oppressed members. Wokeism is inverting the ethical, spiritual, and symbolic system that is the foundation of Western civilization. There is no single law that we are equal under. There should be different rules for different people based on the racial and sexual moral hierarchy of Wokeism.
Wokeism that is driving the demand by elites for anarcho-tyranny rose from the nihilism created by the decline of religion. Without an ultimate basis for deciding what is right and wrong, good or evil, elites turned to hedonism, including through power-seeking and a highly simplified form of altruism, or compassion for the vulnerable, which is itself a way of wielding power. The heavy emphasis on compassion and caring in Christianity was tempered by an Old Testament commitment to equal justice under the law. Compassion unbound by Christian or Enlightenment morality became Wokeism, a morality that inverted historical power dynamics. And, in contrast to Christianity and Enlightenment liberalism, it denies rather than affirms individual human agency and responsibility.
Why did liberals become advocates of anarcho-tyranny? In part, their secularism and nihilism led them to embrace a highly simplistic inversion of Enlightenment values, including equal justice before the law, and impose it on society. Another reason was the growing power of the administrative state, which has sought to expand its influence over more domains of life, from the family to social media platforms.
Political Contradictions of Anarcho-Tyranny
The seeds and spouts of anarcho-tyranny were visible in the post war era through to Francis’s essay in 1994. But it took illiberal Wokeism’s conquering of liberalism and its implementation by Democratic politicians over the last ten years for it to bloom. Defenders of civilization have, over the last 50 years, achieved many remarkable victories, often by running against liberals on questions of law and order. But there’s no question that the trends in the 30 years since Francis’ essay have been toward greater anarcho-tyranny, not less. And if the drivers of it are indeed secularization and the rise of the administrative state, then we might see more, not less, anarcho-tyranny in the future.
The wild card remains politics and pragmatism. Most people like law and order, and personal liberty, at least for themselves. When forced to think about it, or compromise politically, many if not most on the Left embrace law and order and personal freedom for all. Violent crime is unpopular, and both Newsom and other Democratic politicians are at this moment in California cracking down on homeless encampments in order to protect their political dominance. Starmer is cracking down on riots. From a practical perspective, anarchy and chaos are unpopular. As such, left-wing politicians, including Walz, his running mate Kamala Harris, Newsom, Trudeau, Starmer, and their allies, are all vulnerable so long as the chaos continues.
Liberal support for authoritarian measures and policies and its defense of lawlessness for people designated victims and their descendants will either change or face defeat politically. Liberals can return to their historical opposition to authoritarianism or cede the issue to conservatives. Conservatives, who have traditionally placed a higher value on maintaining social order and upholding established hierarchies, may find an opportunity to pick up liberals and libertarians alienated by illiberal Wokeism. If antagonism between Left-Right goes from being liberal-conservative to illiberal-liberal one, the seemingly linear trend toward anarcho-tyranny could still reverse itself.
