Indeed, cyberlibertarians are all about decentralized power structures. The internet is actually anti-democratic in a sense, as it gives individuals direct power, not just by proxy of representative politicians or collective voting (as in a "leftist" world). Therefore it's the most classically liberal political position around. And one not to be mistaken with the authoritarian-"liberal" style generally upheld in current politics.
I really dislike the term cyberlibertarians, since it conflates a (nearly) authority-less society with the movement. We don't call people that go 250 km/h on desert highways "highwaylibertarians". Libertarians will always do what is right, regardless of the law, provided there are no consequences (and even then, they often take the risk). Right now, that is setting up TOR for people longing for unrestricted information, in the past it was smuggling black slaves from the south to Canada.
As for the confusion between democracy and freedom: The root cause of course is that many non-libertarians pattern match and see democratic country and free speech next to each other. But when they try to "democratize" Iraq or Egypt to their horror they see that despite record turn out rates even more restrictive social policies.
This is because the majority of non-libertarians fail to fully accept that democracy only establishes common wishes as a basis for legality. This in and of itself is actually undesirable. Liberalism had a history of "natural" or "negative" rights which during the expansion of the Great Society, it abandoned.
I think you're confusing modern American liberalism with classical liberalism. Despite the word "liberal", they are pretty different. The emphasis on positive rights, like the right to healthcare, is one of the major distinctions.
Actually I'm purposely mixing them. Liberalism was never as black and white as people made it out to be. Sure John Locke had a long list of reasons why natural rights should be a modern tenant of a just society, but to the average citizen the shift from classical liberalism to contemporary liberalism was a series of steps, each of which made sense.
I understand what you're saying, but the average citizen wasn't alive for both John Locke and the Great Society. I guess I disagree with there even being a shift at all. They are quite different worldviews that unfortunately share the word "liberalism".
> Right now, that is setting up TOR for people longing for unrestricted information, in the past it was smuggling black slaves from the south to Canada.
Could you possibly be more self-serving?
For the record, some libertarians think that slaveholders should have been compensated for the "theft" of their "property" and that buying out slaveholders would have been cheaper, and therefore morally superior, to fighting the civil war. There's an ugly strain of Confederate sympathizing among some outspoken libertarians: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/07/10/th...
I'm honestly not sure if you are a troll or not. If not, do not start conversations with "Could you possibly be more self-serving?"
Libertarians, by definition, hold liberty to be a fundamental human right. It is incompatible to advocate for slavery.
As for buying out slaves from the South: obviously that would have been cheaper AND morally superior. When States joined the union they agreed to a constitution. When the constitution was changed to end slavery several states left the union. The unionists held onto military property that was physically located in the south. They were the aggressors in the war.
I don't sympathize with the slave holders, I find them abhorrent. But when you have bank loans tied to slave ownership, the impact of legalizing slavery should be handled rationally. The number of lives lost in the civil war could have been avoided.
Lincoln's election was the trigger to the Southern attempt to secede.
Also, I think the assertion that libertarian ideals are had much to do with participation in the Underground Railroad deserves some citation. Participants include free blacks, Native Americans, certain Christian denominations (like Quakers and Wesleyans), and other abolitionists. I don't doubt they share many values with libertarians, but more obvious motivations for each type of participant come to mind than libertarian fervor.
> Liberalism had a history of "natural" or "negative" rights which during the expansion of the Great Society, it abandoned.
No, it didn't. While certainly some liberal thinkers had a view of rights as exclusively negative, that was not a universal view within liberalism long before the Great Society, and, anyhow, the acceptance of the idea of some positive rights (which isn't necessary to support of Great Society programs -- belief that government should provide things in a particular set of circumstances doesn't require viewing them as rights) does not require abandoning any belief in the existence of specified negative rights.
>belief that government should provide things in a particular set of circumstances doesn't require viewing them as rights
Except that for the government to provide things to people, it has to take them from other people, which conflicts with negative rights. You pretty much need to believe in positive rights to justify violating negative rights.
> Except that for the government to provide things to people, it has to take them from other people, which conflicts with negative rights.
No, it doesn't. It may conflict with particular concepts of negative rights, but a general right not to be taxed, for example, was never a part of the liberal consensus.
> You pretty much need to believe in positive rights to justify violating negative rights.
You seem to think that "negative rights" means a single absolute overarching negative right that the government should do nothing whatsoever effecting you. And, you know, you are entitled to view that as the proper relationship of government to the individual, but absolutely wrong to characterize that as something that was once part of liberalism that is no longer.
I can imagine sets of negative rights which allow taxation and are logically coherent, but there are none which I can imagine anyone considering useful. Can you give an example of such a set?
But I asked for usefulness, not just logical coherency. By that I meant useful in the context of your claim, which was that someone could believe in the Great Society programs without believing in positive rights. Not all logically coherent sets of beliefs are ones an actual person would hold as their only beliefs in the category.
For example, almost anyone will agree that it's bad to take a person's only food away. The (negative) right not to have one's property infringed on exists in the mind of any reasonable person, and they consider it to apply to that case, at least. Perhaps that right is overridden by something in some other cases, but what would you call the overriding something if not a positive right?
I don't think cyber-libertarianism is incompatible with direct or representative democracy. It's probably fair to say that the structure of government takes a back seat to certain expectations about what a "free" person may do in the internet age.
I also agree that cyber-libertarians would not support restrictive government regulation. But it would also not support restrictive corporate control. Effectively, it recognizes new interpretations of the rights to assembly, privacy, property, and speech (and perhaps others). I don't see how that's incompatible with "the right of people to act collectively through government". It just clarifies the implicit stipulation: "as long as natural rights are respected".
Correct. That's why it's ultimately anti-democratic and not at all attempting to adopt leftist ideals (other than maybe social freedom). Note I said "direct power" not "direct democracy" which tends to be confusing to observers.
>Indeed, cyberlibertarians are all about decentralized power structures.
This isn't really true. Libertarians are all about having many centralized power structures. You could call this "decentralized," but it's decentralized in the sense of email being decentralized -- in reality, four entities control email; in a libertarian world I doubt things would be different.
What leftists want is distributed power structures. Facebook is centralized; Email is decentralized; FreeNet[1] is distributed.
I think it'd be a lot more forthcoming for libertarians to say what they actually mean -- something like feudalism -- rather than try to lay claim to a historically leftist term[0].
> not just by proxy of representative politicians or collective voting (as in a "leftist" world)
Are you using quotes here for a reason other than to tonally denigrate leftism?
Voting and representation are hardly hallmarks of leftist political structures. The largest popular leftist movement in the United States recently (Occupy) was based entirely on direct consensus systems (not democracy) (for better or worse).
Democracy is collective action whether by direct or indirect voting. Direct power is individual action (with the implication of freedom from collective action), and is thus libertarian or classically liberal, not democratic.
OK. Your distinction between direct power and direct democracy has been clarified, so I'll set semantic considerations to the side.
I do not see why cyber-libertarianism is incompatible with direct democracy any more than a constitutional republic is. In both cases, basic rights should not (theoretically) be able to be overridden through majority votes. The difference is in what counts as a basic right.
You correctly recognize the key issue that "basic rights" are intrinsically a restriction on democracy. The question is: what counts as "basic rights"? In the U.S., we have a basic set of rights: those enumerated in the Constitution itself plus those that exist as a result of long historical practice plus those recognized by the Supreme Court based on a combination of the other two sources. In a Constitutional republic, rights aren't static, but they're slow to evolve.
Cyber-libertarianism, at least as espoused by many today, embraces a dramatically broader notion of rights. You don't just have the classic rights of Englishmen (life, liberty, and property), but the right to privacy, the right to free and anonymous exchange of information, the right to tinker with your cell phone, the right to turn your apartment into a hotel, the right to transfer money freely and anonymously, etc. Cyber-libertarians tend to believe that government should be restrained from acting unless absolutely necessary, and almost never believe that government action is necessary when it comes to cyberspace. The more rights you recognize, and the broader those rights, the narrower the scope of democratic self determination.
This viewpoint is the diametric opposite of constitutional republicanism. Under that view, government, by the will of the majority, can act so long as it does not invade certain "basic rights." Under cyber-libertarianism, the assumption is reversed. Government is barred from acting unless there is an immensely pressing justification.
Not sure I follow. Significant parts of the left see the institutions of the state as a means to the realization of democracy. Take, for instance, most socialist, social-democratic, or Left parties in contemporary Europe. They advocate for the state to take an active role in making space for democracy (for instance by legislating codetermination in the workplace) and de-commodifying labor to protect the working classes from capital. True, many leftists -- especially those in the communist and anarchist left -- have the long-term goal of abolishing the state, but that doesn't mean the institutions of the state cannot play a role in advancing some of the goals of the left in the interim. Even Nikolai Bukharin did not deny this.
That's what the author is arguing here -- that the state should not be ruled out tout court as a potential site of engagement for those seeking to realize the promises of radical democracy. The author is not saying that state already is the realization of democracy, as your paraphrase suggests.
I doubt that many leftists see the capitalist Western states as "the realization of democracy".