‘Anarcho-Tyranny’ Is Just a Rationalization for Right-Wing Lawlessness

Photo: Eva Marie Uzcategui/ Bloomberg

One of the oldest ideas in European right-wing politics is that productive middle-class white folks are being ground to bits by an alliance between wealthy, stateless predators controlling the instruments of power and an underclass rabble they manipulated for their own ends. In early 20th century Europe, the predators were typically conceived as those in the financial sector and in allied professions, often Jews. The rabble were proletarians, usually socialists or communists, sometimes buttressed by ethnic minorities. Their alleged destructive power became the rationale for counterrevolutionary and explicitly antidemocratic violence aimed at vindicating middle-class interests and imposing “law and order.” As you may be aware, things got a little out of hand.

Similar thinking has long infected the American right with a characteristic racial twist: Jews aren’t the hostile object of any but the fringiest U.S. conservatives, but Black folks (and occasionally other minorities) typically are. Otherwise the dynamics are similar; from the McCarthyites to the John Birch Society to George Wallace’s presidential candidacies to Reagan hard-liners to the tea party to the MAGA movement, it was very commonly claimed that wealthy, overeducated globalist elites (a replacement for “cosmopolitans,” a term traditionally implying “Jews”) were avidly redistributing power and public resources from virtuous white working people to themselves and to their shiftless allies in the urban lower classes. A closely associated idea was that the swarthy proles were essentially voting themselves more “welfare” with no concern whatsoever for the country they were happily fleecing. That was the foundation for Mitt Romney’s famous 2012 appeal to Republican donors to subdue the “47 percent” of Americans who just want to shake down Uncle Sam.

The persistent idea that the predatory rich and the parasitical poor are oppressing the middle class has caused some problems for conservatives. It’s tricky to argue that we must crack down on the allegedly criminal poor while simultaneously calling for a rebellion against the order imposed by “elites.” MAGA Republicans are struggling with this issue right now; they want to defund the federal law enforcement agencies they view as agents of the globalist “deep state” but are also (dishonestly) attacking the left for wanting to defund and restrain regular beat cops working against the “criminal class.”

As Mother Jones reporter Noah Lanard explains, there’s a theory gaining ground in the right-wing fever swamps that squares these circles:

The same day Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Daniel Penny with manslaughter for choking to death Jordan Neely — a homeless man who’d been acting in a way Penny perceived as threatening — Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) recorded a podcast. Elites, he told listeners, were making the common man fearful of defending himself while allowing criminals to roam free. The congressman had a name for this inversion of justice: “anarcho-tyranny” …

Anarcho-tyranny has become a favorite expression for proponents of a new populism on the right. Tucker Carlson has used it to explain everything from the prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse to Democrats’ nonchalant reaction to classified documents at the Penn Biden Center. A few weeks before Fox News fired him, Carlson mused, “It does seem like anarcho-tyranny is one of these ideas, you know, that some political philosopher thought up a long time ago.”

The term “anarcho-tyranny,” notes Lanard, was actually coined by the late conservative columnist Sam Francis, who was fairly explicit about the racial undertones of the term:

In North Carolina, he explained, a “law-abiding citizen” was arrested as part of a media stunt to improve seatbelt enforcement even as violent criminals were being let out of state prisons on parole … Here, he suggested, was a government imposing on us while allowing them to do as they pleased.

Once the population is separated into the virtuous us and the criminally disposed them, all sorts of hypocritical arguments become possible. Is federal domestic spending a problem? Not if it’s directed to the virtuous white middle class that believes it has “earned” Social Security and Medicare benefits. “Welfare” or education spending not controlled by middle-class white parents is another thing altogether.

But the most dangerously hypocritical tenet promoted by the “anarcho-tyranny” point of view is that even as conservatives demand absolute suppression of street crime — sacrificing all of those “liberal” ideas of justice and mercy — the virtuous conservative middle class has no obligation to respect the authority of the liberal elites who supposedly run the country. And indeed, the contemporary conservative cult of mass gun ownership explicitly aimed at resisting liberal “tyranny” represents a pretty clear threat of lawless and even revolutionary action to “set things right” in this country. No wonder these people and their political leaders view the insurrectionists of January 6 as “patriots.” Lawlessness on behalf of the lawful white middle-class majority in this country simply can’t be wrong.