Even for those without such dire prognoses of the near future, it was simply true that the globalization of the 1990s made small states more viable than ever before. Singapore showed that while focusing on exports and free trade might expose you to the vagaries of global demand, it was no longer necessary to grow your own crops to feed your population. As market radicals so often pointed out, microstates like Luxembourg and Monaco were among the richest in the world.

  Paleo-libertarians hoped that the spread of secession as an option would help accelerate economic reform away from social democracy and toward a more stripped-down version of capitalism. The most eloquent proponent of this argument was Rothbard’s protégé Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who carried the torch of his mentor’s vision after Rothbard died of a heart attack in 1995. Trained as a sociologist in Frankfurt, Hoppe immigrated to the United States and joined Rothbard on the faculty at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Business, in 1986.56 An active member of the John Randolph Club, he felt that a reversal happened after the end of the Cold War, as the once somnolent socialist bloc of Eastern Europe became the vanguard of global capitalism. Estonia was governed by a man in his early thirties who claimed that the only economic book he’d ever read was Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose.57 Tiny Montenegro set up a libertarian private university.58 Countries across the region introduced low flat taxes on the advice of neoliberal think tanks.59 As Hoppe saw it, an Eastern Europe filled with small open economies would put pressure on the welfare programs of the West, as those economies sucked in investment and lured away manufacturing jobs. “The emergence of a handful of Eastern European ‘Hong Kongs’ or ‘Singapores,’” he wrote, “would quickly attract substantial amounts of Western capital and entrepreneurial talent.”60

  Hoppe foresaw a supercharging of the dynamic of national self-determination promoted by Woodrow Wilson after World War I, when the once-sprawling Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires were broken up into constituent states and mandates. These future states would be internally homogeneous, he wrote, replacing “the forced integration of the past” with the “voluntary physical segregation of distinct cultures.”61 Hoppe believed that the new territories should be much smaller than the contemporary nation-state. “The smaller the country,” he noted, “the greater pressure to opt for free trade rather than protectionism.”62 Citing micronations and city-states as templates, he called for “a world of tens of thousands of free countries, regions, and cantons, of hundreds of thousands of free cities.” It was a vision of something like Europe’s Middle Ages—the continent in the year 1000 had been a dense pattern of thousands of different polities, reduced over time to a few dozen. Rothbard had said: repeal the twentieth century. Hoppe’s message was more extreme: repeal the millennium.

  In 2005, Hoppe held the first meeting of the Property and Freedom Society in the gilded ballroom of a hotel on the Turkish Riviera owned by his wife.63 In its annual gatherings, the PFS unites former members of the John Randolph Club (which dissolved in 1996) with new advocates of stateless libertarianism and racial secession.64 Prophets of racial and social breakdown share the stage with investment advisors and financial consultants. At one meeting, the psychologist and race theorist Richard Lynn presented his new book on racial intelligence, The Global Bell Curve, while other speakers gave talks on “Public Health as a Lever for Tyranny,” “How to Enrich Yourself at Others’ Expense Without Anyone Noticing It,” and “The Mirage of Cheap Credit.”65 Leon Louw spoke the same year as Carel Boshoff’s son, Carel Boshoff IV, who gave a talk on what he called the “experiment” of Orania.66 One of the organizers praised Orania as a “rare example” of peaceful secession.67 Peter Thiel, at home in this mélange of social conservatism and anti-democratic market radicalism, was scheduled to speak at one of the PFS meetings as well, but canceled at the last minute.68

  At the 2010 annual meeting, a white man raised in Texas, younger than the other speakers, took the stage. In a tweed blazer, with a MacBook on the lectern in front of him, Richard Spencer looked like the history grad student he had recently been. He had just launched an online magazine titled The Alternative Right, a term that would make him notorious. In his talk, Spencer painted a picture of a coming world that looked a lot like the paleo alliance’s vision. Racial separatism would be the new norm: “Latino nationalist communities” in California and the Southwest, Black communities in the “inner cities,” a “Christian reconstructionist Protestant state” in the Midwest.69 For Spencer, present-day politics were heading toward disintegration. The program was to accelerate the collapse while preparing for its arrival.

  Spencer rose to prominence six years later when he translated the Nazi salute of “Sieg Heil” into English, shouting “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” at a rally in Washington, DC.70 To some, the dream of fracture seemed to draw nearer after Trump’s election. The president of the Mises Institute wrote that Trump had shown “the cracks in the globalist narrative” of one-world government and that libertarians should capitalize by supporting all forms of secession.71

  Hoppe became an icon for the Far Right.72 His reputation rested especially on his book Democracy: The God That Failed, which cast universal suffrage as modernity’s original sin because it disempowered the caste of “natural elites” who had organized society under monarchy and feudalism.73 The welfare state spawned by democracy had dysgenic effects, Hoppe argued, encouraging the reproduction of the less able and keeping the talented from excelling. He drew on racial scientists to support his idea that it was necessary to split up into smaller homogeneous communities to reverse the process of “decivilization.”74 The passage that most delighted the Far Right was the one that openly embraced the expulsion of political undesirables. “There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order,” Hoppe wrote. “They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.”75 Hoppe’s face appeared in a variety of online imagery on the theme of removal, often accompanied by a helicopter, in reference to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s notorious disposal of the bodies of opponents from the air.

  One of the last talks Rothbard gave before his death took place on a plantation outside Atlanta and envisioned the day when the statues of Union generals and presidents would be “toppled and melted down” like the statue of Lenin in East Berlin, and monuments to Confederate heroes would be erected in their place.76 Of course, many such Confederate statues already existed. The defense of one of them, a statue of General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, became a symbolic stand for white nationalists in August 2017. Dressed in matching white polo shirts and khaki pants, they carried tiki torches and marched through the city, channeling anxieties of white demographic decline in their chant: “You will not replace us.”77 One of the organizers of the rally, a white nationalist, was a Hoppe fan—he sold bumper stickers reading I PHYSICAL REMOVAL.78

  Rather than disavow such support, Hoppe praised the insights. In 2018, he wrote the foreword for a book titled White, Right, and Libertarian; its cover featured a helicopter with four bodies dangling from it, their heads displaying the logos of communism, Islam, antifa, and feminism.79 Hoppe felt that the Far Right’s emphasis on common culture and even common race showed how to create social cohesion in a future stateless society. Its militant opposition to non-white immigration was also compatible with the closed-borders position that the paleo-libertarians had been promoting since the early 1990s.80 In the end, he would seem to have no quarrel with an image that appeared on message boards. It showed Rothbard, Hoppe, and Mises (drawn in the style of the Far Right icon Pepe the Frog) standing in front of the gold-and-black anarcho-capitalist flag, with Hoppe carrying an assault rifle. In this extreme version of crack-up capitalism, the zone was defined by race and marked by militant intolerance.

  3.

  The dream of bringing back the Old South looked like an abject failure. No “Commonwealth of Southern States” emerged.81 Yet there was something more to the paleo alliance than a fever dream of taffeta and chattel slavery. The idea of an independent free-trading South reflected shifting geographies of investment and manufacturing as factories gravitated to places where union laws were weaker and tax breaks were larger. Global logistic hubs were operating in Memphis (FedEx) and Louisville (UPS). Atlanta’s airport was the busiest for passenger traffic in the world. The North Carolina Global TransPark brought sea, road, rail, and air links into a fifteen-thousand-acre zone.82

  The rural stretches beyond Dallas, the city where the John Randolph Club first met, were grazing lands for most of the twentieth century, but in its last decade they became more profitable as fracking lands. As the shale revolution brought new wealth, the public ownership of land became ever more politicized. Less than 2 percent of Texas land was federally owned, but in Nevada—where Rothbard and Hoppe taught—84 percent of it was. For those with a vision of a totally privatized country like the paleo-libertarians, this was a continually waving red flag. In the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century, the desire for ownership fueled secessionist movements, ranging from the would-be Free State of Jefferson in Northern California to the militant ranchers who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Such groups sought to seize territory from the collectivists of Washington, DC, stake out their own homesteads, and create parallel structures of power.83 These were not nostalgic throwbacks to earlier eras of self-sufficiency but land grabs centered on the globally traded commodities of beef, oil, and timber.

  Dallas itself could have showed the John Randolph Club that modern capitalism offered many ways to distance yourself from other populations without a flag or a seat in the United Nations while remaining interconnected economically. For over a century, the city had been a laboratory for the forms of contract, exclusion, and segregation that the paleo alliance dreamed of. In the 1920s, it passed a law prohibiting racial mixing on city blocks. Whites policed the divisions with vigilante violence. As the city grew, the whites seceded into incorporated enclaves; their tax dollars would pay for their own schools, not those of the city at large.84

  The 1990s were not just a time of fracturing sovereignties in Europe. The same kind of thing was happening in American hinterlands. The decade saw an explosion of a new kind of housing complex: the gated community, the latest innovation in spatial segregation. Rothbard and Hoppe’s home of Las Vegas was the fastest-growing city in the United States that decade, and the gated community was its favored form. An African American city councilor protesting the multiplication of the walled communities called them “private utopias.”85 The phrase was well chosen. To those who said that the paleo visions were far-fetched, one might respond that their future was already here, in the segregated realities of the American city and its sprawling surroundings. The gated enclaves and walled settlements, the object of much angst and editorializing from centrists and leftist liberals concerned about the decline of public culture, were one of the more stimulating bright spots for libertarians. They asked the question: What if these hated suburban forms were good, actually? Maybe here, in miniature, the project of alternative private government could take root, the creation of liberated zones within the occupied territory. This could be “soft secession” within the state, not outside it. The crack-up could begin at home.

  6

  Cosplaying the New Middle Ages

  Concentration of gated communities in United States, 1996

  REPRODUCED FROM EDWARD J. BLAKELY AND MARY SNYDER, FORTRESS AMERICA: GATED COMMUNITIES IN THE UNITED STATES (WASHINGTON, DC: BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS, 1997)

  When neoliberal luminaries met in 1990 to crown Hong Kong the freest economy in the world, they chose a stunning location in which to do so.1 The community of Sea Ranch has about ten thousand residents along ten miles of the Northern California coast. The bungalows are steep-roofed and striated in windbeaten gray and brown. They crouch behind lichen-covered bluffs and nestle in the soft swells of moors. The whole landscape is dipped in honey when the sun sets out on the flat line of the Pacific. The buildings have been lingered over in countless coffee table books, glossy features in Dwell and Architectural Digest, and latter-day Instagram feeds and Pinterest boards. The aesthetic lends itself to fetishization. The New York Times called Sea Ranch a modernist utopia.2 But it was also, more mundanely, a gated community—a utopia of private property and rules. The population at the time of the 1990 meeting was 97 percent white.3 Life was governed by a fifty-six-page document called The Sea Ranch Restrictions.4 It limited the height of trees, enforced muted colors for drapes, and banned clothes hung from visible lines. The original planner called it a kibbutz without the socialism.5 You were free to choose here but only insofar as you adhered to a greater edict: follow the fixed rules.

  The coast had a long history of enclosure and exclusion. Russians arrived there in the 1840s, in pursuit of the “soft gold” of sea otter fur. They claimed a chunk of land and built walls out of tree trunks to make a settlement called Fort Ross (from Rus, the root of Russia). When a Muscovite of high culture arrived, she created a salon atmosphere, hosted dances, and built a glass conservatory.6 But when the otters were gone, the Russians were, too, selling the buildings cheap to German farmers. The Mexican government took over the territory; for a month in 1846, the breakaway Bear Republic of California claimed sovereignty over the region, before giving way to the United States and leaving only the animal on the new state flag. A mill was built to turn felled trees into timber but burned down at the turn of the century. Decades later, the patch of land found new use as a real estate asset and a realm of sensory pleasure.

  Founded in the 1960s, Sea Ranch was a pioneer in the revival of the walled settlement, the return of the fort to the coast after a century’s absence. By the end of the century, gated communities were more than just a new kind of real estate—they became metaphors of the moment.7 They seemed to capture the paradox of the post–Cold War decade, when two forces battled each other. One was a sense of ever-greater connection, of seamless mobility and communication. The other was a feeling of isolation, of social separation and new walls—global apartheid, to use a term that gained currency even as the system formally vanished in South Africa.8 Gated communities were closed but interconnected, linked to the world by “ribbons of roadway, fiber-optic cables and digital electromagnetic signals.”9 Struggling to describe the emerging order, many reached to the deep past and diagnosed the return of a new Middle Ages. “We are building a kind of medieval landscape,” an architecture critic lamented, “in which defensible, walled and gated towns dot the countryside.”10

  Market radicals were not depressed by these events—they were inspired. For them, the gated community was more than a metaphor. Like the London Docklands and the Bantustan of Ciskei, it was a laboratory, a place to practice micro-ordering and keep the project of perforation rolling. They embraced the centrifugal force of settlement and the multiplication of different legal arrangements. Drafting new maps for decentralization, they drew up plans for the return of law and order, medieval style.

  1.

  Few took the fetish for the Middle Ages as literally as Milton Friedman’s son, David Director Friedman, whose intellectual trajectory reflects the radicalization of libertarian thought in the late twentieth century. Born in New York City in 1945, David grew up in the academic enclave of Hyde Park, where his father taught at the University of Chicago. Though not a gated community, Hyde Park was a postage stamp of under two square miles surrounded by the poorer and blacker neighborhoods of the South Side, and a front line in the fight over race and property in midcentury America. Attempts to desegregate the enclave in the 1940s ran into a wall of opposition from its residents. In one pamphlet, homeowners described the neighborhood’s racial covenants as “morally justified and not motivated by prejudice.” They argued that the restrictive covenants were “private contracts” that offered security of investment and “safeguards against the deteriorating influence of undesirable neighbors.”11 In Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman expressed his own opposition to laws against discrimination. He preferred that education be totally private, with people paying for it through state-provided vouchers. If they wanted to use their tax money to pay for a segregated school, then so be it.12

  As an undergraduate at Harvard in the early 1960s, David was part of a conservative revival catalyzed by the presidential run of Barry Goldwater, whom his father was helping advise.13 After returning to Hyde Park for a graduate degree in theoretical physics at the University of Chicago, he wrote a regular column for the conservative youth publication the New Guard. The tone was pugnacious. “Student rebels are our enemies,” began one column. “The rebels, if they resort to force, should be hung from the nearest lamppost.”14 The New York Times Magazine singled him out as among the “most brilliant and articulate spokesmen” of the libertarian movement. “Ask not what government can do for you … ask rather what government is doing to you,” he proclaimed.15 With horn-rimmed glasses and his longish hair in a frizzy halo, he delivered provocative banter with the relish of a dorm-room debate champion. For public occasions, he sometimes added a gold medallion with a torch of liberty wrapped in the DONT TREAD ON ME snake of the Gadsden flag and the letters TANSTAAFL, for his father’s well-known coinage: “There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.”16

  David Friedman’s politics leaned much further toward actual statelessness than those of his father. Milton was a skeptic of public education but he believed that government was necessary for a range of other functions, from law and order to property rights, printing and controlling money, and even, at times, fighting monopoly and punishing polluters.17 As he often insisted, he was no anarchist. His son, by contrast, was. Two years out from his physics doctorate, David published a manifesto titled The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism.18 The book staked out an extreme position, joining Murray Rothbard’s call for anarcho-capitalism, defined as a system in which all state services—from roads to courts and the police—would be privatized. Public law would cease to exist altogether, along with any semblance of democracy.