When people die violently or something explodes, it’s usually the authoritarians who leap to explain what it all means. What they always think it means is that they need more power.
Apparent ISIS followers crushing 15 people with a truck in New Orleans and blowing up a person in a Tesla (adjacent to a Trump hotel) in Vegas might not have big ripple effects on policy, but the attacks are oddly well-timed for bolstering (or seeming to bolster) the arguments of at least two political factions who deserve no encouragement: military interventionists (regardless of party), who now fear Trump will not share their enthusiasm for trying to reshape foreign warzones such as Syria, and the nativist faction of MAGA, who see every crime as reason to close the border, even when the perpetrators are homegrown and, it appears, were trained by the U.S. military.
Our response options after mass casualty events shouldn’t be limited to attacking foreign locales or attacking peaceful border-crossers at home.
Immediately before the terror attacks—though plainly the world changes quickly—the big debate within the right was not between the militarists and the nativists, though, but more nearly between capitalists and nativists. The fighting between the increasingly openly-racist anti-immigration faction (people like pundit Nick Fuentes) and the quasi-libertarian faction (represented in the past few days by market-defending Vivek Ramaswamy and immigrant technophile Elon Musk) is the latest manifestation of a longstanding division on the right—but a division that seems to keep getting stupider.
The current fight is in some sense the dumb, popularized version of a more intelligent debate begun in the pages of National Review and the writings of Frank Meyer in the 1950s about how best to resolve the tension between capitalism and traditionalism. Meyer thought the two could complement each other nicely, and the combo was called “fusionism.” At times I’ve called myself a fusionist. Put another way, you’ll need a society with both markets and morals if you don’t want to end up poor and don’t want to end up stabbed in the ribs for no reason.
I never took that formulation to have significant racial or migratory implications. In the end, stabbing’s bad for everyone.
Thank goodness Musk, Ramaswamy, and eventually Trump himself have defended the idea that opportunity and overall wealth are increased by letting talent from abroad collaborate with companies in the U.S., as for instance by letting high-skilled workers in on H-1B visas. But the debate of the past several days has often degenerated into condemnations from the anti-Musk faction (or more precisely and tellingly the anti-Ramaswamy faction) of virtually anyone non-white who thinks of himself as fully American.
Ugly ethnic spats, not just here but around the world, often function as crude proxies for the loftier philosophical debates people ought to be having.
Musk’s self-proclaimed “Dark MAGA” faction of Trump supporters (not originally intended to imply a skin tone, certainly not his own), by fighting the unabashedly pro-white and anti-immigrant faction of Trump supporters, is fighting a battle that maps onto the fault line on the right that could also be described, roughly, as separating those hoping Trump will make good on his recent vow to boost wealth in the U.S. so much that it’ll usher in a “Golden Age” (some might say it’ll be at best a new “Gilded Age,” but I’d take it) from those who would prefer a return to “Bronze Age” values of manliness and combat (attitudes that risk leading to overly-boisterous eruptions such as the January 6, 2021 fracas but presumably aren’t intended to drag humanity back to the eons of short lives full of illiteracy and slavery).
Or the rift could be seen as separating the “tech bros” (right-wingers focused like Musk on ushering in a long, profitable future of cyborgs and bio-engineered Mars colonizers) from what we might call the “trad bros” (the back-to-the-land, low-tech prairie-core enthusiasts founding old-fashioned churches in their homes).
Freedom should enable every faction to do as it pleases so long as it doesn’t seize the bodies or property of another faction to do it. Refraining from seizures should mean allowing people to travel where they like, assuming they aren’t trespassing on private property, and to work where they like. Unless you’re a communist or a fascist, you should recognize that you don’t have some prior claim to the money that an employer wants to give to another applicant for a given position. You should still have the right to form whatever voluntary communities or organizations you like with others using their own private property—not things they’ve gained by force, whether burglary or the imposition of regulations forbidding certain people to work in certain places.
Banning immigrants from jobs in the U.S. is just affirmative action for white people and should be seen as embarrassing—especially to anyone with obnoxious pretensions to being the best ethnic group ever. Maybe you are. Prove it in the marketplace, bro.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
