In describing the Earth’s atmosphere through the ages, Dr. Wally Broecker once famously said that “the climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks.”
With wildfires and hurricanes and 144 straight days of temperatures above 100F in Phoenix fueling the hottest September on record (the 429th straight month of global temperatures above the 20th century average) one might think that even deniers would start noticing that the angry beast is waking up.
Unfortunately, the odds are slim that’s going to happen, and even if it did, it’s not like politicians who are staunchly opposed to regulations are suddenly going to have an about-face.
In fact, we know that even when confronted head-on with literal, actual, real-life beasts, the libertarian worldview will still resort to denial and inaction. We know this, because it’s happened.
A new book reviewed in the Atlantic by Patrick Blanchfield this week provides a history of an experiment in hands-off governance with the story of a small town in New Hampshire that was taken over by libertarians -- before it was taken over by bears.
That’s the very short version of Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s new book, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears). It tells the story of the Free Town Project, an attempt to liberate the 800-resident New Hampshire town of Grafton from the oppressive boot of big government.
According to Blanchfield, “Hongoltz-Hetling presents, in microcosm, a case study in how a politics that fetishizes the pursuit of ‘freedom,’ both individual and economic, is in fact a recipe for impoverishment and supercharged vulnerability on both fronts at once. In a United States wracked by virus, mounting climate change, and ruthless corporate pillaging and governmental deregulation, the lessons from one tiny New Hampshire town are stark indeed.”
The libertarian settlers ran into some immediate problems, Blanchfield describes, as they “expected to be greeted as liberators,” but “tensions flared further when a little Googling revealed what ‘freedom’ entailed for some of the new colonists. One of the original masterminds of the plan, a certain Larry Pendarvis, had written of his intention to create a space honoring the freedom to ‘traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights.’ He had also bemoaned the persecution of the ‘victimless crime’ that is ‘consensual cannibalism.’ While Pendarvis eventually had to take his mail-order Filipina bride business and dreams of municipal takeovers elsewhere (read: Texas), his comrades in the Free Town Project remained undeterred.”
Other notable characters included an “anti-circumcision activist” named Richard Angell (AKA, apparently, “Dick Angel,”) anti-capitalist Adam Franz, whose survivalist tent city ended up more like a walled off prison compound, and John Connell, who bought the Grafton Center Meetinghouse, turned it into a church (of sorts) and made himself pastor. Connell was on what Blanchfield described as, “a quixotic quest to secure tax exemption while refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the IRS to grant it.” Like most of his compatriots, he too was unsuccessful, Blanchfield writes, and “a financially ruined Connell found himself unable to keep the heat on at the Meetinghouse; in the midst of a brutal winter, he waxed apocalyptic and then died in a fire.” While most were not so terribly misfortunate, it doesn’t seem any managed to turn this tax-free, small government haven into anything as profitable as their ideology promised. (Even their Rand-referencing real estate venture Grafton Gulch went bankrupt.)
As anyone could have predicted, standard small-town issues ramped up, with potholes, violent crime spikes, the city being unable to keep the heat on for workers, and so on. Hongoltz-Hetling writes that “despite several promising efforts, a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.”
And then, with the town “feral,” the bears arrived.
It’s unclear why, though climate-induced drought and warming winters are referenced as some of many possible causes, including more proximate ones like “Doughnut Lady,” who scattered (what else?) doughnuts on her lawn for bears to eat.
“But one thing is clear,” Blanchfield summarized: “the libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem.”
And that’s really the lesson of H-H’s book, Blanchfield concludes: “Ignoring institutional failure and mounting crises does not make them go away.”
It's almost like denial is not such a great governing philosophy…