“The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.” – H.L. Mencken
Murray Rothbard has a great section in For A New Liberty that includes this quote from Mencken. The section, titled “The State and the Intellectuals,” is about how the state employs a class of experts to convince the public that “the State and its rulers are wise, good, sometimes divine, and at the very least inevitable and better than any conceivable alternatives.”
This was at the top of my mind while watching Dave Smith and Douglas Murray on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Murray dismissed Smith, Rogan, and other podcasters for discussing history and current events without “experts.” Which experts? Why, the ones that Murray deems credible! As the author of Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, he thinks that the only ones qualified to speak on foreign policy are the ones who agree that rich western countries have a duty to wage war for the sake of spreading democracy.
Murray’s main point was to discredit those who question official narratives surrounding war:
There are a lot of people who have come along … and they’ve decided, “I can play this double game. On the one hand I’m going to push really edgy and frankly sometimes horrific opinions and then if you say, ‘that’s wrong,’” they say, “I’m a comedian. … How can you tell me [‘that’s wrong’] – I’m just a comedian – I’m just throwing stuff out.”
On its face, this criticism is fine, but if this line of attack is all you’ve got, then you’ve lost the debate. It didn’t land on Smith, who came prepared to sift through the arguments and the evidence backing them up. For what it’s worth, I’ve never seen Dave Smith back away from a tough spot in a debate by saying, “I’m just a comedian!”
Murray didn’t really point out what Smith gets wrong in his anti-war, libertarian view of the history of US military entanglements. He only resorted to logical fallacies like attacking strawmen, appealing to “experts,” and ad hominem. Rogan and Smith repeatedly pointed out these flaws in Murray’s arguments, trying to get at what Murray actually finds inaccurate or incomplete in Smith’s arguments (all of which were backed up by evidence and sound reasoning). But these attempts failed as Murray cyclically wriggled in and out by constructing and reconstructing strawmen and moving the goalposts.
One of the best examples of this is when Dave Smith brought up the Israeli blockades of Gaza, citing World Bank data indicating it resulted in a 40% drop in Gaza’s GDP. His point was that such actions exacerbated the poverty and desperation in the region, playing an important role in fomenting the disastrous conflict that continues today. His larger point was that there is shared responsibility for the current conflict.
Instead of addressing the substance of Smith’s point, Murray responded by making fun of the fact that a libertarian would cite the World Bank and by dismissing Smith’s entire argument because Smith hasn’t physically witnessed the crossing points into Gaza.
Instead of participating in a good faith debate over the arguments for and against particular wars, the state’s intellectuals quash the idea of a debate. If they do find themselves in one, they dismiss the other side for not being one of the officially recognized experts on the matter.
This is an old tactic. Rothbard recounts a debate between Senator Robert Taft and McGeorge Bundy on the Korean war:
A public debate between “isolationist” Senator Robert A. Taft and one of the leading national security intellectuals, McGeorge Bundy, was instructive in demarking both the issues at stake and the attitude of the intellectual ruling elite. Bundy attacked Taft in early 1951 for opening a public debate on the waging of the Korean war. Bundy insisted that only the executive policy leaders were equipped to manipulate diplomatic and military force in a lengthy decades-long period of limited war against the communist nations. It was important, Bundy maintained, that public opinion and public debate be excluded from promulgating any policy role in this area. For, he warned, the public was unfortunately not committed to the rigid national purposes discerned by the policy managers; it merely responded to the ad hoc realities of given situations. Bundy also maintained that there should be no recriminations or even examinations of the decisions of the policy managers, because it was important that the public accept their decisions without question. Taft, in contrast, denounced the secret decision-making by military advisers and specialists in the executive branch, decisions effectively sealed off from public scrutiny. Furthermore, he complained, “If anyone dared to suggest criticism or even a thorough debate, he was at once branded as an isolationist and a saboteur of unity and the bipartisan foreign policy.”
The advocates for war always rely on lies and dismissing any debate. When the lies are pointed out, those interested in the truth are attacked as conspirators with the enemy. Debate is beneath the foreign policy “experts,” perhaps because they know their ideas aren’t defensible.
