Analysis  

A Revolution by Other Means

by Max Orhai

Some freedom fighters take up arms at the first opportunity. Others prefer to "work within the system." A determined few have chosen another course.

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What's a libertarian to do? There's no place for people like us, it seems. It's difficult to accept, but most people in America — most people in the world — aren't just ignorant or stupid: they genuinely prefer government control of their own and their neighbors' lives. We can hand out flyers for the rest of our lives, publish as many books as we like, make speeches until we're blue in the face, and most of them aren't going to change their minds. While they disagree among themselves about the details, authoritarians of one sort or another constitute an overwhelming majority. What are we going to do, stage a coup and coerce them into "freedom"? We can pack up and move, of course . . . but to where? What is the libertarian movement moving toward? Is it moving at all?

Libertarian influence on American politics has so far been disappointing. Government at all levels continues to grow every year. The ideal of strictly limited governance (or none at all) doesn't have much of a voice in the American political scene; it's drowned out by the roar and crash of the seething masses of special interests, each with its own well-justified plans for state intervention in one sphere or another.

Carl von Clausewitz, a 19th-century military strategist, is best remembered for his observation that "war is the continuation of politics by other means." While I am hardly the first to observe that the reverse is more generally true, it's easy for law-abiding American civilians to forget, even during tax season, the constant threat of violence that underlies our peaceful society. We blithely throw around phrases like "culture war" when describing conflicts played out in the media and the legislature; "revolution" is a word so thoroughly abused that to see it employed in advertisements for stereo equipment or mattresses gives us no pause. Consciously or unconsciously, we mostly assume that our domestic political problems have political answers, even in the face of contrary evidence.

Some libertarians see the political game as unwinnable, and have shifted their focus from the public sphere to the personal, taking direct, personal actions to increase their own individual liberty. This sort of personal secession is sometimes called "dropping out." It's a pragmatic approach which offers immediate, though limited, gratification at the cost of participation in certain normative institutions (like banks). Anyone on this path treads close to being an outlaw, a dangerous position to occupy in an increasingly nosey and regulated world.

Nobody is seriously agitating for an armed and violent revolution. For most, things just don't seem bad enough. And such a war is even more surely doomed to fail than the Libertarian Party's candidates. Still, there remains a small number whom nothing less will satisfy, and their roots run deep. The only American wars fought on American soil have been wars of secession, fought by armed and intractable minorities against the current of popular opinion. The most successful, and of course the most glorified, of these began in 1776. How many of us remember the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, fought by western (which at that time meant Pennsylvanian) farmers in the name of "Liberty or Death" and "Equal Taxation and No Excise" and bloodily put down by an army Washington raised from the militias of the eastern states? How many even remember what the Civil War of the 1860s was actually about?

Some do, and are preparing to fight it all over again. When conditions get oppressive enough, some few Americans will take up arms against their government, and perhaps against their neighbors, to accomplish "by other means" what politics could not. These struggles, while perhaps righteous, are extremely unlikely to succeed. Sufficient foresight and strategy could possibly give such a revolution a fighting chance at success, though this remains doubtful.

But then, sufficient foresight might also make it unnecessary.

Four years ago, Walter Williams suggested that federal encroachment into basic liberties and natural human rights has gone so far that the situation may be only resolved by secession: "If one group of people prefers government control and management of people's lives, and another prefers liberty and a desire to be left alone, should they be required to fight, antagonize one another, and risk bloodshed and loss of life in order to impose their preferences, or should they be able to peaceably part company and go their separate ways? . . . Just as in a marriage, where vows are broken, our human rights protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution have been grossly violated by a government instituted to protect them. . . . Americans who wish to live free have two options: We can resist, fight and risk bloodshed to force America's tyrants to respect our liberties and human rights, or we can seek a peaceful resolution of our irreconcilable differences by separating. That can be done by peopling several states, say Texas and Louisiana, controlling their legislatures and then issuing a unilateral declaration of independence just as the Founders did in 1776."

Williams seemed to think such a revolution could be relatively bloodless, like Norway's 1905 secession from Sweden, Panama's 1903 separation from Colombia, or West Virginia's from Virginia in 1863. It was just a bit of speculation, but apparently an idea whose time had come. In July of 2001, Jason Sorens, a political science doctoral student at Yale, announced the Free State Project. He noted the conspicuous political failures of the libertarian movement and expressed concern for the future of liberty: "[W]orld affairs are currently at the cusp of a new direction. Freedom can still win out, at least in some areas, but if it does not the prospects are dire. . . . if we do not carve out a sphere for freedom now, freedom will be lost for a long time to come." Sorens' studies of secessionist and regional autonomy movements in Britain, Europe, and elsewhere around the world led him to believe that the threat of secession on the part of one American state would be sufficient leverage against the federal government to force concessions for liberty, at least in that state. He dismissed out of hand the possibility of actual armed conflict: "In 'modern, democratic' countries the use of violence against legal secessionist movements is out of the question."

The Free State Project leadership discourages the notion that the project is an attempt at "takeover." Nor is the Project secessionist, goes the party line. The purpose of the FSP is simply to move at least 20,000 freedom activists of any affiliation (except for politically untouchable white separatists) to one state, where they can each exert "the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of civil government is the protection of life, liberty, and property." When the threshold is reached and the move is accomplished, the Project will dissolve, leaving those involved free to organize, or otherwise pursue their activism, however they please. The colonialist and secessionist undercurrents are unmistakable, though. Without the threat of some kind of force, even mere democratic "force of numbers," the effort can pose no threat to the status quo. One way of looking at the FSP is as a desperate effort of ideological refugees, demographically adrift, to find a home. Too bad for the natives, but it can't be helped. Great things are at stake. Manifest Destiny. Those unfortunate social democrats and public moralists currently inhabiting the chosen Free State have, absent a change of heart, 49 other American states and the rest of the civilized world to relocate to.

The notion of a libertarian niche, enclave, or colony is a persistent one. There have been plenty of naive "Let's start a new country!" or "Let's take over a county!" schemes that didn't go anywhere. On the surface, the idea is a little absurd: isn't the communitarian impulse basically at odds with the idea of individual freedom? How much of a community can be built around the core value of minding your own business? Yet the most ruggedly individualistic of us nonetheless lives in society and must ultimately answer to the belief systems of our neighbors. And the longing for cultural cohesion, for community, is felt no less by libertarians than anyone else. Being part of a close-knit society and being unmolested by a mass of unnecessary laws are not mutually exclusive.

There is a more benign interpretation. It is more practical than it has ever been for a person of modest means to move great distances. People therefore tend to group together geographically according to their similarities. We seek out neighbors like ourselves, and in doing so become more like our neighbors. It's a sort of market-driven process: decentralized and largely haphazard, one of many concurrent influences on individuals' choices. The Internet, by lowering the costs of communication, has made possible entirely new forms of collective action. The Free State Project is an attempt to consciously and consensually give form and speed to some small corner of the vast natural churn of American migration. From this perspective, it is not a political movement, so much as a cultural movement, born out of the recognition that the majority of Americans aren't interested in living in the kind of culture that libertarians long for.

That longing is particularly acute in the young, and it is to young people that the Free State concept has the greatest appeal. "Liberty in our lifetime," the motto of the Free State Project, seems more realistic to those who expect several more decades worth of "our lifetime." According to the membership survey taken at the time of the state vote, FSP members are 75% male, and 75% are under the age of 50. Thirty-seven percent are under age 35. Three-quarters don't have children, or at least won't bring more than one person with them when they move. These are people of ambition in search of more favorable conditions: like any immigrants, they are a hopeful bunch. Risk-takers. But these pioneers are immigrants within their own country, searching for an America that is gradually disappearing.

Despite the homogenizing effects of a centralized national media and a federal government of unprecedented bulk and power, there are significant cultural differences between the American states. This is, in itself, unsurprising. The "melting pot" ideal cannot be achieved in a venue as large as the contemporary United States: the diversification process inherent in cultural evolution precludes it. Any American city, while home to an astounding array of overlapping subcultures, develops nevertheless a unique feeling, and rural areas too can't help but gain their own distinct characters over time. The state, to the extent that it works as advertised, simply reflects whatever common ideology the political process can distill from its constituent cultures. The Free State Project is an effort to reverse-engineer that political process: a backwards gerrymander.

Sorens' pragmatic arguments for a concentration of at least 20,000 libertarian activists in one state have been generally well received by the movement, even after the "rally 'round the flag" hysteria of 9/11. The Free State Project's membership has grown healthily, reaching the 5,000 mark with the signature of Boston T. Party in August 2003. Five thousand was the agreed-upon threshold for selecting a particular state; there were ten low-population states under consideration. The voting method used, Simple Condorcet's, allowed voters to assign any rank to any number of candidate states, and compared each state against all the others to determine the overall winner. On October 1st, the results of the vote were announced:

Rank State

1. New Hampshire
2. Wyoming
3. Montana
4. Idaho
5. Alaska
6. Maine
7. Vermont
8. Delaware
9. South Dakota
10. North Dakota

Only 2,388, or 46%, of the 5,170 ballots mailed to members were returned. Clearly, not everyone involved takes the project very seriously.

The FSP has relied heavily on the Internet culture. This culture, while strongly libertarian, has largely been ambivalent, even disdainful, toward geography. The early rhetoric of "cyberspace" boldly proclaimed the net a place unto itself, apart from and independent of the physical world. Actions taken (that is, words written) in online forums always seem somehow disconnected from reality, which is why we can have, for example, flame wars. Everybody involved is merely sitting in front of their keyboards and monitors, and when they get up from their chairs, their virtual world, with all its zany inhabitants, goes away. Although the FSP's organizers have made every effort to emphasize the solemn contractual nature of the "Join!" button on the membership web form, it remains to be seen just how seriously the members will take their pledges to move, if and when the time comes. Such a contract can hardly be legally binding without any tangible consideration exchanged, and it's ridiculous to imagine the FSP trying to enforce it, even if it were.

On the other hand, Americans have notoriously shallow roots, and many of the FSP members seem anxious to get out of wherever they're currently living. Over a dozen people have already reported moving to New Hampshire, apparently figuring that it's an improvement for them regardless of the success of the project. About half of those who returned the membership survey with their ballots say they intend to move within the next three years, although the Project only asks members to move within five years of the 20,000-member milestone (which is expected to be reached in 2006).

New Hampshire has the geographic advantage of being adjacent to Canada as well as the Atlantic Ocean, although both borders are small. The indigenous political culture is about as libertarian as that of any American state, rooted in proud New England revolutionary history. The state constitution is the only one in the world which explicitly mentions "the right of revolution." It's the only state with neither sales nor income tax, and has very low overall taxation. Although New Hampshire has a high population density, it hasn't any major urban centers — but it's close enough to the Boston metro area for specialized urban workers to commute. In fact, the southern part of the state is already experiencing an influx of liberal Massachusetts suburbanites, which will doubtless dilute the effect of the Free State Project.

The Free State membership agreement originally allowed members to opt out of any states they wouldn't move to, and 1,021 founding members, about 20% of the total membership at the time of the vote and mostly from western states, opted out of New Hampshire. Naturally, it wasn't long before the birth of the Free West Alliance. The Free West Alliance is a web-based community of rather less formal nature than the FSP, created in November 2003 to promote the three contiguous northern Rocky Mountain states, which were the runners-up in the FSP vote, as a unified "Region of Freedom," and to advocate Jeffersonian ideals of government within these states. Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho have a combined population 2.2 times that of New Hampshire, and 36 times New Hampshire's square miles. (It's also interesting to note that a quite similar organization in Canada was already in place in January 2003, under the freewest.net domain.) The founders of the Alliance cheerfully admit that three states are two too many in which to concentrate electoral influence, but are in no hurry to narrow their scope, figuring that a consensus, if necessary, will emerge naturally over time. Much of the core membership will meet in Three Forks, Mont. on April 2325 for the "Grand Western Conference II" (the first such conference was held in Missoula, Mont. last year under the FSP banner). Headlining speakers will include J.J. Johnson of the Sierra Times, and Boston T. Party. Boston, a leader of the libertarian right (whose punning pseudonym seems to be his preferred public identity, even after publishing "Hologram of Liberty" under the presumably more genuine moniker Kenneth W. Royce) isn't very popular with the Free State Project these days: the publicity gimmick of his 5,000th signature went sour when he publicly criticized the New Hampshire decision and began to promote his own "Free State Wyoming" plan, a dramatized version of which is outlined in his newly published first novel, "Molôn Labé."

The grounds for Party's preference are largely cultural, and his argument has an urgent tone. He quotes Thucydides: "The state that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools." According to Boston, the East is already hopeless for liberty: it's too crowded and doesn't have enough 500-yard rifle ranges — or a thriving gun culture. "Libertarian philosophy is, in the end, moot if its adherents have no final resort of armed defense. . . . The Nerf and Egghead Libertarians don't like hearing this, obviously, but facts are stubborn things." Boston, and the rural right "Patriot" movement which he considers to be liberty's core constituency, is expecting a fight with the feds, or at least thinks we should, on principle, prepare for one. His analysis is based on conspiracy theories, but it is also grounded in basic historical truths about the nature of power and political change. Unsurprisingly, his approach to a Free State gerrymander is much more unapologetically regimented: less a migration than an invasion. He claims that just 4,000 new residents of Wyoming, if properly organized, could legally take over a significant part of the state government.

The "Egghead and Nerf Libertarians" — intellectuals and ideologues without the means or will to do battle for their freedom — are indeed the ones most solidly behind the New Hampshire decision. The FSP membership survey didn't collect any data on gun ownership, but it did indicate that those who assigned New Hampshire their first preference are overwhelmingly highly educated, middle-class, and urban or suburban: a demographic relatively unlikely to be part of the American gun culture. They had better be very confident that things really are different now, that Sorens is right about "modern, democratic" governments being above the use of violence against rebellions. And if the Free State Project, or any other such effort, is not in fact a rebellion, what good is it? It wasn't that long ago that Mao Tse-tung uttered the simple, though ugly, truism: "All political power comes through the barrel of a gun."

Meanwhile, there are international libertarian efforts like the Awdal Roads Company, which seeks to attract investment and immigration to the currently more-or-less ungoverned regions of Somalia; and Rigoberto Stewart's Lim—n REAL Project, which intends to make "a Free and Autonomous Region" of the Lim—n province on Costa Rica's East coast. There are island tax-haven nations with private banking industries. Sealand, the most extreme example there currently is of a free state, is still going strong after 35 years; you can't actually visit, but they'll be happy to host your website. Somebody's begun a European Free State Project, although it doesn't seem to be exactly thriving yet. And of course there's Switzerland, arguably the most libertarian country in the world.

Whatever the New World Order looks like, there will be, despite Sorens' worries, "a sphere for freedom." It's impossible to give any accurate estimate of the number of dropouts in America alone. There are people without Social Security numbers who do all their business in cash. And what about people who won't send their kids to public school, or register their concealed weapons, or who use any of a bewildering number of legal, quasi-legal, or illegal methods of avoiding taxes? How many people don't obey the drug laws? How many do obey the speed-limit laws? The fraction of people who value freedom over obedience to arbitrary authority, or the illusion of safety, or the opinions of their neighbors, may — or may not — be small, but we are powerful regardless. We don't recognize each other in the street. We mostly don't think of ourselves as belonging to a "movement," or if we do we don't think we belong to the same movement. In fact, we don't: we are individuals. And we have communities, too. In a world where organizing becomes ever easier, our communities are becoming more numerous, stronger, and more visible. Some of us will join the Free State Project. Others of us may move to Wyoming or Costa Rica. Others won't join anything at all — but regardless of the success of any of these efforts, as long as some people are willing to fight and to die for freedom, some people will be free.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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