I initially passed on LiquidZulu’s “Anatomy of the Celebritarian” critique of Dave Smith when he released it. I passed mainly because I no longer care to defend Smith due to his anti-American and anti-white attitude toward Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, magnified by his simping for brown people who hate us when they clash with Israel. Smith has even cucked on immigration, now demanding of an operation mass deporting millions (which he has claimed on multiple occaisions to support) to avoid making any mistakes or hurting anyone, a cheap virtue huckstering of himself by contrast with failure to meet an outrageously unrealistic moral standard he asserts.
Recently however, a couple of colleagues asked me for my thoughts on the video. It is out of respect for them rather than Smith that I listened to it in its entirety in my car recently. I don’t believe I missed anything from the visuals, but feel free to point them out to me if this is the case. My reaction is mostly “meh.” Zulu does deserve credit for important, on-point and well-deserved criticism of Smith at point in Smith’s career where he fell short as a libertarian apologist. However, Zulu’s criticism of the broader type of libertarian Smith represents, i.e. a right-wing one with a sensible set of political priorities, falls flat, not just because I think Zulu is wrong for disagreeing with our priorities, but because the bad-faith and self-aggrandizing way Zulu attacks them.
Zulu presents the fundamental difference between him and Smith as being respectively one of “principled radicalism” vs “pragmatism.” He discusses the philosophy of Pragmatism and attempts to tie Smith to it. Pragmatism is a philosophy developed primarily by William James circa the turn of the 20th century. My knowledge of Pragmatism is second hand, but I think I have a good gist of what it’s about. Based on that, Zulu seems in the video to, as many Objectivists are criticized for, argue against a crude caricature of his philosophical opponents. Zulu seems to attribute to such opponents the dictionary definition of lower-case p pragmatism, which is an emphasis on expediency that tends to disregard ideals, principles, or even philosophy itself, to Pragmatism. It is telling that William James’ name is not mentioned once in the video. He instead quotes John Dewey, who was influenced by Pragmatism but was not at all an architect of the philosophy:
“Men, instead of being proud of accepting and asserting beliefs and “principles” on the ground of loyalty, will be as ashamed of that procedure as they would now be to confess their assent to a scientific theory out of reverence for Newton or Helmholz or whomever, without regard to evidence.
If one stops to consider the matter, is there not something strange in the fact that men should consider loyalty to “laws,” principles, standards, ideals to be an inherent virtue, accounted unto them for righteousness? It is as if they were making up for some secret sense of weakness by rigidity and intensity of insistent attachment. A moral law, like a law in physics, is not something to swear by and stick to at all hazards […].1”
Of this Zulu says:
“I think that is about as clear as one can get in outright rejecting the concept of a principled approach to ethical questions.”
Dewey does not reject principles here however. He rejects treating adherence to them without regard to evidence as an inherent virtue. He is correct on this for because for one thing “inherent virtue” is a contradiction in terms. Virtue is efficacy in value creation, and there is no value without a valuer. Dewey may be right about evidence as well, at least in a secular sense. If ethics is solely a matter of faith, they are a solely a religious matter. Philosophy has nothing to say about it. Dewey was of course a bad actor, and his above quote is just the motte in a motte-and-bailey where he sought to replace rational, evidence-based principles in politics and education with irrational and deluded principles of his own. Principles are still principles however, and not even Dewey was so unsophisticated as to simply cast them aside.
What does William James actually say about Pragmatism? Contra Zulu, who throughout the video characterizes it as seeking immediate results, in the Second Lecture on Pragmatism James says:
“The word ‘pragmatism’ has meant everything from the mere striving after working results to the tendency to get ahead of scientific principles and to let philosophy follow the lead of the arts and crafts. But the pragmatic method, as I have just stated it, is not a method of the arts and crafts, but a method of logic, or rather, of logical criticism, which applies to all elements of belief…”
James’ method here is one of truth pursuit, using a particular definition of truth. Zulu describes the Pragmatist definition as: “[t]he true is that which works; and a thing working means that it achieves certain purposes, purposes held by a consciousness.” That Zulu is setting up a straw man here to knock down is indicated by the preceding part of the sentence:
“Of course, there are many objections to pragmatism, not least is that it is a form of the primacy of consciousness: the thesis that consciousness precedes existence. They tell us that the true is that which works; and a thing working means that it achieves certain purposes, purposes held by a consciousness. So the true is that which satisfies the purposes of a consciousness.”
This is not precisely what James says of truth however:
‘Grant an idea or belief to be true,’ it says, ‘what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?’ The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: TRUE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CAN ASSIMILATE, VALIDATE, CORROBORATE AND VERIFY. FALSE IDEAS ARE THOSE THAT WE CANNOT. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as.”1
There is nothing to indicate that James regards consciousness as metaphysically primary. Indeed, some of James’ phrasing indicates some agreement with Objectivism (the philosophy Zulu espouses): “if the belief were false?” James treats belief’s veracity as one that has an independent basis in reality distinct from belief, unlike certain postmodernists who treat truth as relative to belief itself. The concept of truth is an epistemological matter anyway, not a metaphysical one. The error comes from taking the ability to apply the concept of truth to discussion of metaphysics as proof that truth itself is inherently metaphysical. Indeed, if we apply the Pragmatic method to metaphysics, the primacy question is arguably irrelevant: It could very well be that our consciousness is an awareness of something, and that something is a product of consciousness. Zulu would dismiss this as circular, but it could also simply be recursion, an essential feature of many software programs. Regardless, as long as the conscious experience is sufficiently consistent in its constituent properties, reason can function in integrating those properties to model such experience in the future. Because we cannot experience any existence other than our own, the question of primacy is irrelevant to truth. Zulu’s straw man does not even impersonate the man of the hour, it is really nothing more than a red herring.
Rather than immediacy, James’ conceives Pragmatism as seeking to verify what leads us “prosperously” from one part of our stream of experience to another:
“You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be CHANGED.”
The last phrase is easily misunderstood. James is not saying that experience determines or changes reality, but that a part of reality, our environment, is malleable to a degree, and that a key part of truth pursuit is identifying what is malleable and how.
Zulu goes on to criticize Pragmatism, and more broadly consequentialism, on the basis that what “works” for people is value subjective:
“Pragmatism simply takes as given that you already come into it with a code of values provided by some other school, and then it tells you that given those values here’s how you can tell what works to achieve them or not.”
This is another straw man, specifically a fallacy of an ignored alternative. Values are not provided by another philosophical school, they inhere in our unique neurology and circumstance. They are a given inheritance. Although I find great value in Objectivism, this is where I part company with Ayn Rand, who held that values are something rationally chosen. Rationality however, applies only to the actualization of given values, it does not create or choose them. It does not even apply to them. Values are neither rational nor irrational; they are arational. A persistent error that Objectivists make is taking the arational for the irrational. They take the refusal to invert the direction of reason’s proper application as rejection of reason itself. In this, they actually imply primacy of consciousness: Because reason and values are both part of consciousness and reason is involved in actualization of values, values must be the product of reason, rather than a prior existent we are conscious of. Objectivists and “objective morality” believers generally also commit the error of taking value subjectivity for value randomness. They treat as sound the moral relativist2 argument that if values are subjective, there is no reason we should defend our own values versus any others. They disagree not with its logic but with its premise. The truth is that the premise is correct but the conclusion is false. It is false because justification is not applicable to values. Once again, they are given.
On the whole I think Zulu, along with many libertarians, make too much hay about getting the ethical foundation of libertarianism “correct.” It’s counterproductive to insist that people support a movement for the “correct” reasons. A good example is how many libertarians denounce Javier Milei despite his terrific success because part of his motivation is supporting Israel. What should matter is that they meaningfully advance liberty, and that the movement has the wherewithal to extract contributions from people with bad reasons while quarantining such toxicity. My own organization takes this principle to its logical conclusion by excluding libertarians who retard the advancement of liberty and including non-libertarians who further it. If anything, the consequentialist approach of David Friedman is the a stronger foundation than Zulu’s because it allows us to more easily promote libertarianism in terms of values that many good, productive people hold that aren’t limited to natural rights. Moralism turns people off.
Zulu sees the specter of pragmatism not only in the left-libertarian capital-P Pragmatist Caucus represented by Nick Sarwark but also the Mises Caucus represented by Dave Smith. He terms the latter “Neo-Prags.” Zulu’s views the Mises Caucus as failing to improve on the Pragmatist Caucus. This is a highly disparaging view, because Pragmatist Caucus was very much the opposite of what the most charitable interpretation of their name represents. William James would have reviled them for their dogmatic attachment to party over political purpose. This is despite the fact that the very reason the Mises Caucus was formed was to put the Libertarian Party back on a principled footing. Zulu to his credit, acknowledges this by quoting from Dave Smith’s debate with Nick Sarwark on the topic. Zulu does not mention that Smith won this debate however. One can criticize Smith for inadequate understanding of principle, or for what one believes is a misapplication of principle, but his commitment to principle has never been in question. I agree with Zulu that the first two items apply to Smith, but not the third.
Smith’s poor understanding of the principles of libertarian theory were evident in the debate he lost with Andrew Wilson, and Zulu does a very good job of taking Smith to task for this. Zulu shines in particular in providing the clear explanation of the Rothbard’s e contrario argument that Smith failed to. I have some criticisms of my own regarding Smith’s performance to round out Zulu’s. The first is Smith’s acceptance of a poorly-formulated debate topic: “Is Libertarianism better than Christian Populism?” Zulu criticizes this for putting the burden on the libertarian to demonstrate superiority, but on this I think he’s being a bit too autistic. The gist of the topic is really just “which is better?” The problem I have with the topic is that it implies a mutual exclusivity that should not be automatically accepted. Far better in my opinion would have been to format the title of the debate as a resolution: “Is Libertarianism The Real Christian Populism?” The Christian case for libertarianism is extremely strong (another thing Objectivists get wrong), and libertarianism certainly identifies many legitimate grievances that ordinary people have against a privileged elite.
Zulu spends most of the time criticizing how Smith responds to Wilson’s challenge to demonstrate self-ownership. Zulu is right about how Smith mangled Argumentation Ethics here and how the e contrario argument would have worked better. I think Smith missed an opportunity to reject the validity of Wilson’s challenge itself however. That Wilson opened the debate by challenging Smith to demonstrate rather than explain self-ownership implies Wilson’s acceptance of self-ownership’s coherence as a concept. The error Wilson makes is demanding in “demonstration” that Smith treat self-ownership as something that needs to be cosmically objective like what Wilson believes his own doctrine of “divine command” to be, as “more” than a social convention. What Smith should have pointed out is that even Wilson’s doctrine of “divine command” is something that, on top of being personally accepted on faith, has to be socially translated, transmitted, and applied. The manner in which this occurs can change over time, which Wilson contends is somehow a weakness of self-ownership but not his own doctrine. What Wilson overlooks is that for certain conventions like ownership, the changes are mainly at the edges in cases like slavery. There is still significant conceptual overlap across time and place. All political philosophies apply only to a society. It is in light of this that Smith should have questioned the productivity of arguing which position is more of a social construct. Smith should have reframed the debate as between conflicting policy sets that derive from different values. As discussed earlier, intellectual demonstration is not applicable to values, they are given. At this point Smith could preempt Wilson’s contention regarding value subjectivity by pointing out that libertarianism’s acceptance of such subjectivity is a feature, not a bug. Libertarianism is the resolution of such subjectivity via the property norm.
That an ideology is a social convention, which necessarily implies potentiality of social contravention, is neither an indictment nor endorsement of that ideology. An ideology is desire for the big picture to differ from the status quo. Even people who think that the status quo is perfect still desire for everyone else to stop trying to change the status quo. Ideology is therefore defined by deviation from it. That social deviations from a norm over time or place exist not only does not refute a norm as such, it validates it because the very defintion of norm is meaningless absent variance! Finally, Smith could have nabbed Wilson for at certain points substituting the term “social construct” for “social convention.” The former is cribbed directly from the left. It is nothing more than a pseudointellectual dodge of biological realities that the left is averse to, realities like race and sex. The property norm itself is a biological reality that transcends the human species. If Wilson was looking for an objectively demonstrable basis for self-ownership, Smith would have done well to hit him with this.
Zulu also criticizes Smith for not biting the bullet when Wilson pointed out that hardcore libertarianism rejects conscription and legal prohibition of non-reproductive incest. Zulu criticizes Smith for abandonment of principle alone. In Smith’s defense here, principle is a causal identity that generalizes. Generalization however, usually carries exceptions. Libertarian is still a reasonable label when it applies to the full set of your policy positions much better than any other. A liberal is still a liberal even if a small minority of his positions are conservative and vice versa. A better criticism of Smith is that he missed an opportunity to show how libertarianism promotes patriotism and punishes depravity better than alternative systems. I go into detail on this in my article on prohibition.
Zulu claims that Smith fails to live up to the example set by Smith’s greatest hero, Ron Paul. To support this claim, Zulu characterizes Ron Paul as someone who exemplified the approach championed by Albert Jay Nock in his essay “Isaiah’s Job.” The biblical story emphasizes the value of perserverance in the preaching of truth even though most people will not listen. This is because even though civilization may well be doomed to collapse because too great a portion of its population is too far gone, there exists a Remnant of people receptive enough to your message who will be the ones to rebuild civilization when the time comes. While Ron Paul does indeed exemplify this, what Zulu ignores is that even Ron Paul had enough situational awareness to adjust his messaging to his audience. In his presidential campaigns he reversed course on the white nationalism of his 90s newsletters, reverting to espousing Ayn Rand’s straw man of racism being the most primitive form of collectivism. Even though white nationalism is crucial to the long-term furtherance of liberty, Paul had the sense in 2008 and 2012 to recognize that America wasn’t ready for that message yet. In politics however, much can change in a short time. A majority of the right, including many libertarians, now realize that for America to remain free it must be preserved as majority white. Zulu supports open-borders while denouncing restrictionists as pragmatists.
The pragmatist boogeyman Zulu tilts at seems to be a rationalization of his open-borders lunacy. This is suggested by the inordinate amount of time he spends in the video reviewing Smith’s debate on immigration with Alex Nowrasteh. I’m not going to go out of my way relitigating the debate here. I will say that a great bulk of Zulu’s argument rests on the premise that property cannot be held jointly. This is false because libertarianism is a doctrine of homesteader primacy3, and the overwhelming majority of property in the world was homesteaded jointly by clans, not lone-wolf individuals. In addition, rejection of joint-ownership would necessitate coercive restriction of people who want to voluntarily apportion among themselve the stream of benefits that an asset provides. Zulu fails to appreciate the very basic legal distinction between a natural person and a party to an agreement. A party comprises one or more natural persons. The individualist part of libertarianism that legitimizes an agreement is that each natural person has to voluntarily consent to the agreement. There is no limit to the number of persons who can be part of a party to an agreement however. The libertarian property norm requires that a scarce resource be owned by a single party, not a single person.
In the section on Smith’s immigration debate, Zulu actually tries to claim that because the state doesn’t transfer the title of the property it purchases with taxpayer money to the taxpayer, the taxpayer has no claim to that property. And within this very same section, Zulu has the gall to call Smith the legal positivist! I think this pretty much sums up how seriously we should take Zulu on the immigration issue. Further unseriousness on his part is his claim that Smith’s proposal of moving the military from abroad to our border would entail martial enforcement of immigration law inside our country.
I did enjoy Zulu’s comparison of Smith to the character of Gail Wynand in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. Smith, like Wynand, is a slave to his audience. Wynand is still vastly superior to Smith however, because at least he knows what he feeds them is slop and holds his audience in contempt for this. Smith however, actually believes that he is providing his audience with elite libertarian apology, flexing the tagline “the most consistent motherfucker you know,” which Zulu rightfully calls him out on. Unlike Zulu I think that Smith is sincere in his rationalization of pandering to his audience as being principled, because Smith’s audience does include many principled libertarians. Unfortunately being a principled libertarian does not make someone a good person overall, and most of Smith’s audience are effete contrarian hipsters, mosly of either the libertarian or groyper variety, NPCs who unreflectively oppose the current thing rather supporting it. Smith’s pandering to such people undoes him on the war issue, where he perverts libertarianism into pacifism. Zulu fails to call Smith out on this however, because he actually agrees with him!
Zulu has a sizable section of the video where he promotes a strategy of “libertarian Leninism.” This uses tactics that Lenin and other leaders of small minority factions to wield massively outsized influence. An example of this tactic is running a radical LP candidate with the intention of extracting concessions from one of the major parties in exchange for dropping out the race. Zulu deserves credit for proposing a practical course of action rather than just complaining about Smith and the Mises Caucus’ actions. He also deserves credit for countersignalling agorists’ denunciation of Javier Milei. He fails to differentiate himself with his proposal however, because Smith’s Mises Caucus colleague Angela McArdle has advocated the same thing.
Again, my biggest issue with Liquid Zulu is not that he criticizes Dave Smith. Smith has indeed let the liberty movement down in significant areas concerning the application of libertarian principle. Zulu and I agree partially on which areas these are. On certain areas however, what Zulu takes to be a failure to stick to principle on Smith’s part I regard as reasonable consistency. The most significant of these is immigration, and what I dislike about Zulu even more than his stance on borders is the dishonest chauvinism with which he positions his stance. He calls libertarians who see borders as a critical instance of property boundaries “pragmatists” (which as we have seen is a toothless accusation anyway) or “fake libertarians.” He stoops to hurling the latter label at Smith in the conclusion of the video using a cheap gotcha based on the fact that Smith has at one point said that if someone were to convince him that policing commons like borders were unlibertarian, he would reject libertarianism. Objective third parties to this conflict will recognize that, whether they agree with Smith’s issue positions or not, he is very much affirming with this statement his commitment to principle. Smith’s commitment to being principled about political philosophy goes so far that he considers a single deviation from that philosophy’s core principle as rejection of the philosophy. I don’t go as far as Smith here. As mentioned near the beginning, I think it would be perfectly fine for Smith to continue calling himself a libertarian in such a scenario if the other broad labels were less accurate still in conveying his set of policy positions. Zulu, in his inquisitorial myopia, discounts the possibility that it is commitment to the higher principle of intellectual integrity that leads Smith to remind his followers that political philosophy is a domain where his mind is always open to change with compelling logic and evidence. Zulu ultimately attacks Smith for true purism: The commitment to treating libertarianism purely for what it is – a legal doctrine rather than a religious cult.
In light of this, Zulu’s attempt to portray his opponents as cargo cultists early in the video, then condemning them for failing to follow the example of Isaiah in the middle of the video, comes off as projection on his part. When I found out about the video, my tweeting appreciative amusement over the fact that Smith had driven Zulu to produce a scripted three hour video (in which I made it clear this was in spite of my dislike of Smith) cost me a few followers. This behavior does little to dispel the impression of Zulu’s following being a cult. Indeed, many of his followers actively reinforce this impression with their satirical “Zeil Zulu” salute and their chant of “I would not take the ladder.”4 Their behavior is a kind of semi-self aware post irony. They know they’re cultists, but they believe their cult is the one good one, a cult of principle rather than power. Regarding principle and power, they’re right in a sense. They are principled, but they treat the principles of individualism and non-aggression they have warped into principles of atomism and pacifism as religious dogmas. Not unrelatedly, they are powerless, which is obviously a good thing. The warped principles they cleave to are what lead them to the insane conclusions that Zulu posits in the video, like that the Mises Caucus are no more principled or effective than the Pragmatist Caucus, and that the president the latter helped elect is no improvement over what Kamala Harris would have been. The primary evidence that Zulu cites in favor of the latter conclusion is Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration and restriction of legal immigration. This only works as evidence however, if you’re an open-borders libertarian. For restrictionists, Trump’s immigration policy is a massive win. Zulu is so self-absorbed, blinkered, and chauvinistic, he cannot even acknowledge what a massive controversy immigration is within the libertarian movement. Of course, political philosophy is not determined democratically by the movement it animates. This weighs in favor of the restrictionist position, as libertarianism’s two leading thinkers in Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe both became strongly restrictionist the further they took the philosophy. They are far from the only restrictionist luminaries either. Zulu also cites Trump’s foreign policy as evidence, despite the fact that it has included wins like deposing a communist dictator in Maduro and weakening Russia’s communist influence by neutering their greatest Middle Eastern ally in Iran. Let’s throw Zulu a bone here however, and discount immigration and foreign policy in comparing Trump and Harris. I asked Grok to ignore those issues in grading Trump and Harris as libertarians by the standards of its greatest thinkers in Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and Ayn Rand. Using a score of -2 to +2 instead of letter grades, weighting each of 10 issues equally, Trump scores 0, while Harris scores -17. This does not even count Trump’s full and unconditional pardon of Ross Ulbricht, a tremendous libertarian victory that belongs solely to Angela McArdle and the Mises Caucus, and that absolutely could not have been achieved with a Harris administration.
Zulu makes a number of fair criticisms of Smith and a number of unfair ones. Zulu’s priorities as a libertarian are so poor however, that on the most important libertarian issue, immigration and MAGA, the ones that determine whether any other libertarian policies are even possible, he falls flat on his face. While Smith, due to shortcomings where he is truly pragmatist in the non-philosophical way, doesn’t go as far as I would like on these either, compared to Zulu is still a better, more practical libertarian on this count alone merely by not failing on them.
1 The emphasis is James.’ It might have been clearer however, if he had emphasized only WE. The notion of assimilation etc. external to ourselves is of no practical value.
2 Subjectivity is a type of relativity. Relativity refers to variance in relation to something else. Subjectivity is variance in relation to consciousness or personal experience. It is relativity’s impersonal meaning that is the likely reason why the term “moral relativism” is much more of a pejorative than “moral subjectivism.”
3 Zulu has a section where he criticizes Smith’s presentation of homesteader primacy. Zulu’s (correct) criticism is not of primacy itself, but that Smith promotes Locke’s “labor mixing” as the criterion of what constitutes legitimate homesteading. This is merely another labor theory of value, in contrast to libertarianism’s conflict-avoidance doctrine concerning the subjective valuations of resource consumers.
4 In reference to a libertarian stress test, in which NAPtists like Zulu condemn taking a neighbor’s ladder without permission to save their mother from her burning house. Sane libertarians have no problem taking the ladder as long as the taker pays restitution if the neighbor asks for it.
