American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, by Michael Willrich, Basic Books, 480 pages, $35

The lawmaking and policing powers of late 19th and early 20th century America did not think anarchist agitators deserved the protective penumbra of our Constitution. After Emma Goldman immigrated to the United States in 1885 from czarist Russia, she became a dynamic and hugely popular traveling lecturer on anarchism and other rebellious causes, such as draft resistance and contraception. Consequently, she was arrested a lot—and in 1919, along with hundreds of other accused anarchists, she was deported to what was now Bolshevik Russia. (Goldman's version of anarchism was not the free market kind; she wanted to eliminate private property as well as the state.)

Many anarchists saw a bright side to these legal fights: an opportunity to preach their beliefs in a courtroom setting, where the press often amplified their message. The anarchists sentenced to death in the notorious 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing case spent three days in court laying out their beliefs; in one of their own trials, Goldman and her sometime consort and lifelong comrade, Alexander Berkman, settled for five hours of speaking their anarchist minds.

Berkman did more than lecture against the state and capitalism; in 1892 he decided to try to kill a murderously strikebreaking Carnegie Steel factory manager, Henry Frick. (While he shot and stabbed Frick, he failed to kill him.) This did not help public opinion of their cause. Neither did the fact that Leon Czolgosz, the 1901 assassin of President William McKinley, was a self-proclaimed anarchist who claimed that Goldman's rhetoric had "set me on fire."

In American Anarchy, the Brandeis historian Michael Willrich argues that those legal battles surrounding anarchism in America forged two distinct and opposing elements of modern American policing and law.

On one hand, the anarchists' enemies, from New York City cops to military intelligence to the departments of Labor and Justice, built a wider and more intrusive system of political surveillance and repression to quell and expel the anarchists. These systems' techniques—often relying on frequently unreliable, nativist, and paranoid citizen snoops and snitches—might seem quaint in the post–Edward Snowden age. They also seem especially brutal, given the cops of that era's habit of giving "the third degree" (that is, terrible beatings) to seditious radicals, and to people the officers merely assumed were seditious radicals. Many prosecutions hinged on the accuracy, or not, of some cop's written notes on what a suspect had allegedly said in public.

This repressive apparatus, Willrich writes, was "cobbled…together by putting public power in the hands of private civilian operatives, harnessing local police to national purposes, and drawing upon surveillance technologies developed both in the U.S.-ruled Philippines and in the internal immigrant 'colonies' of New York." The result was "an inefficient and stunningly violent operation that foiled few actual plots, put thousands of people on trial for speaking out against capitalism or the war….and showed an almost total disregard for…constitutional liberties."

And that planted the seeds of these battles' second great effect: Ironically, they ultimately made First Amendment doctrine more respectful of free expression. After the crackdown on the anarchists died down, and past the Cold War repressions under the Smith Act, it became more difficult to imagine anyone could go to jail in America solely for saying or writing a political heresy. Even when people are targeted for their speech, propriety requires that a more substantial charge be added. (The modern inheritor of the mantle of "enemy for whom constitutional protections can be ignored" is the drug seller and user, though different amendments are implicated.)

Three prosecutions during the World War I–era crackdown on political dissidents under the Espionage Act ended up before the Supreme Court. Free expression lost every time. But in Abrams v. United States, based on a 1918 expansion of the Espionage Act known as the Sedition Act, a dissent signed by two justices established an attitude toward the First Amendment's reach that became standard over the course of the 20th century.

In August 1918, the Army Corps of Intelligence Police had arrested a group of Russian immigrants in New York for distributing allegedly seditious pamphlets. The defendants insisted that the literature—many copies of which were tossed out windows for passersby on the street—was not meant to impede the ongoing U.S. war efforts against Germany, that being the basis for many of the charges. The literature was rather opposed to U.S. interference in revolutionary Russia, with whom we were not at constitutionally declared war.

The Abrams defendants were represented by Goldman's lawyer, Harry Weinberger. His role in Willrich's narrative is as central as hers and Berkman's. (Willrich argues that the war on anarchists essentially created the modern figure of the civil liberties lawyer.) The Supreme Court upheld the convictions, 7–2. But a dissent authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (who had written the earlier, bad decisions in the Espionage Act cases) laid out a First Amendment vision that more strictly limits when government could constitutionally punish expression: only if said expression represents a "present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about."

After reading the dissent, a future founder of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to Weinberger that "we are going to put it to some use all right." Civil libertarians in and out of the judiciary have been doing so ever since, in ways that have expanded Americans' expressive rights.

***

Things got predictably worse for civil liberties and for anarchists as the war went on. The 1918 Immigration Act, as Willrich sums it up, "authorized the secretary of labor to deport any person identified as a noncitizen and an anarchist." Even your individual beliefs could be elided, since "being a member of an organization that advocated 'anarchistic' ideas was now sufficient cause for deportation." Having built your life here productively for decades and having a family was not enough to save you from being grabbed and shipped out, if a government official thought you didn't believe the state should exist. (In 1903, during the post-Czolgosz wave of anti-anarchist action, Congress passed an immigration law that barred entry to anarchists, though it was difficult to enforce and in its first seven years caught a mere 10 anarchists among millions of immigrants entering.)

The story of the anarchist crackdown is, for good reasons, often used as a crackerjack historical example of the anti-liberty madness that even the supposed land of the free can descend to. This wave of anarchist repression was indeed destructive to many people and organizations—the Industrial Workers of the World, for example, were nearly annihilated by mass raids and arrests.

But the aftermath of these authoritarian spasms suggests we should give at least half a cheer for the Constitution. The rights it lays out were sorely dishonored, but at least they could be called upon eventually.

After World War I ended, President Woodrow Wilson commuted sentences for more than 125 Espionage Act prisoners. One assistant secretary of labor—Louis Post, who actually respected the Constitution—canceled 1,140 deportation orders, nearly three-quarters of the cases he was able to review when briefly in command of the process. The notorious 1919 and 1920 Palmer Raids sent 500 accused radicals to Ellis Island for deportation, but as public opinion and the grinding of the courts turned against the mania, only 23 of them were actually deported. And in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt gave a general amnesty to the remaining World War I–era political prisoners.

Contrast that with Russia, where many of the anarchists were deported. The Bolshevik state murdered many of them, including two of the Abrams defendants.

Willrich's richly detailed study is especially relevant today, as that expansive sense of First Amendment rights that Willrich traces back to Holmes' Abrams dissent is under fresh fire from legal academics who see the amendment as a barrier to progressive change, from young Americans who think certain possibly hurtful things ought not be legally spoken, and from a culture that in general seems increasingly and angrily eager to shut opponents up. This valuable book shows one big reason why an expansive reading of the First Amendment is important: Without it, human beings have been beaten by cops and exiled from their home, just for saying or writing things the authorities don't like.

Goldman, for one, thought America was better than that. She once told a huge crowd in New York City that when people like her denounced war and conscription, they did this not because "we are foreigners and don't care." They had come here "looking to America as the promised land," and they grappled with the country's errors "precisely because we love America."

The post When Attacks on Anarchists Accidentally Improved Free Speech Law appeared first on Reason.com.

Donald Trump was not the first celebrity presidential candidate who could reasonably be accused of insurrection against the United States. Many decades before Trump, another best-selling author and charismatic leader in a rowdy movement to upend dominant American political mores aimed for the U.S. presidency—Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers' minister of information and the author of Soul on Ice.

Unlike Trump, who this year overcame challenges from Colorado, Maine, and Illinois about his eligibility due to the Constitution's Insurrection Clause, Cleaver couldn't be caught up by the 14th Amendment, Section 3, since that explicitly only bars insurrectionists who had already been government officials. But Cleaver faced his own eligibility hurdles.

In 1968, as the first presidential nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), formed mostly by antiwar radicals disenchanted with Lyndon Johnson's Democratic Party, Cleaver was below the constitutionally mandated age of 35 and would have been so still on Inauguration Day in 1969. At least three states did eliminate his name, if not his party, from the ballot for this reason.

Many states, however, allowed someone absolutely constitutionally disqualified to remain on their ballot; in Iowa, as reported in the Davenport Times-Democrat, the secretary of state "ruled that he must accept the certification in the absence of positive proof that Cleaver is not of eligible age."

While the various charges haunting Trump during his current campaign involve less violent crimes, Cleaver, four months before receiving the PFP nomination with 74 percent of the delegates' votes, engaged in a firefight with Oakland police that resulted in another Panther's death. He was thus campaigning while out on bail, pending trial for three counts of assault and attempted murder.

As the PFP's candidate, Cleaver certainly sounded like an insurrectionist, not that there was anything (constitutionally) wrong with that. In a campaign speech, as printed in a 1968 issue of the North American Review, Cleaver said: "What we need is a revolution in the white mother country and national liberation for the black colony. To achieve these ends we believe that political and military machinery that does not exist now and has never existed must be created."

The PFP, aligning with the Panthers, pushed Cleaver as its presidential hopeful with a dual agenda, as expressed by member Richard Yanowitz in an online memoir of PFP history: "immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and support for black liberation and self-determination."

During the PFP's inaugural California convention, Cleaver said that he regarded black members of the PFP as "misguided political freaks," but he eventually embraced the alliance and accepted the PFP's national nomination, saying on the campaign trail that "we believe that all black colonial subjects should be members of the Black Panther Party, and that all American citizens should be members of the Peace and Freedom Party." The Panthers' intention, he said, was to "use our papier-mâché right to vote to help strengthen the Peace and Freedom Party and to help it attain its objectives within the framework of political realities in the mother country."

The leftist political tumult out of which the PFP arose in 1968 had many elements that echo modern-day political dynamics. Debates raged about whether black activists should have influence above their numbers and whether the movement should explicitly oppose Zionism. The same sorts of petition barricades to getting a new party on the ballot existed then, though the PFP's campaign in California in particular was a huge success, with 105,000 signatures gathered when only 66,000 were needed.

But rumors persisted about how clearly petitioners informed signers that they were officially registering with the party. PFPers insisted they let signers know they could change their registration back after the PFP got ballot access and before the election. And indeed, the PFP got over 70 percent fewer votes for the presidential race in California than it did petition signatures.

Despite his patent ineligibility and being knocked off the ballot in a few states, Cleaver's PFP campaign garnered over 36,000 votes nationwide. In late September, he polled at 2 percent in California but received far fewer votes on Election Day—a common fate for third-party candidates. Shortly after his electoral defeat, Cleaver fled the U.S. rather than face trial for the Oakland incident, not returning until 1975, after which he served less than a year in jail along with lots of probation and community service.

The cases of Trump and Cleaver illustrate a persistent American theme. Whether because they are mad at the perverted communists dominating the Democratic Party (as per MAGA) or the colonialist and imperialist white power structure (as per the PFP), a segment of American voters want insurrectionist candidates. Who are election officials to deny them?

The post The Black Panther Who Was Banned From the Ballot appeared first on Reason.com.

David Boaz, longtime executive vice president at the Cato Institute, died this week at age 70 in hospice after a battle with cancer.

Boaz was born in Kentucky in 1953 to a political family, with members holding the offices of prosecutor, congressman, and judge. He was thus the type "staying up to watch the New Hampshire primary when I was 10 years old," as he said in a 1998 interview for my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

In the early to mid-1970s, Boaz was a young conservative activist, working on conservative papers at Vanderbilt University, where he was a student from 1971 to 1975. After graduation, he worked with Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), in whose national office he served in various capacities from 1975 to 1978, including editing its magazine, New Guard.

In the 1970s, he recalls, YAF saw themselves as not merely College Republicans but were instead "organized around a set of ideas." When he started with YAF he already thought of himself as a libertarian but saw libertarianism "as a brand of conservatism. But during my tenure at YAF, as I got to know people in the libertarian movement, I came to believe that conservatives and libertarians were not the same thing and it became uncomfortable for me to work in the YAF office."

Now fully understanding libertarianism as something distinct from right-wing conservatism, "I badgered Ed Crane to find me a job and take me away from all this." Boaz had met him when Crane was representing the Libertarian Party (L.P.) at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the mid-'70s and kept in touch with him when Crane was running Cato from San Francisco from 1977 to 1981. Via his relationship with Crane, Boaz became one of two staffers on Ed Clark's campaign for governor of California in 1978, which earned over 5 percent of the popular vote. (Clark was officially an independent because of ballot access requirements but was a member of the L.P. and ran with L.P. branding.)

Boaz then worked with the now-defunct Council for a Competitive Economy (CCE) from 1978 to 1980, which he described as "a free market group of businessmen opposed not only to regulations and taxes but to subsidies and tariffs…in effect it was to be a business front group for the libertarian movement." He left CCE to work on Ed Clark's 1980 L.P. presidential campaign, where Boaz wrote, commissioned, and edited campaign issue papers as well as the chapters written by the various ghosts for Clark's official campaign book. Boaz also did speech writing and road work with Clark.

The campaign Boaz worked on earned slightly over 1 percent, 920,000 total votes—records for the L.P. that were not beaten until Gary Johnson's 2012 run (in raw votes) and 2016 run (in percentages). "The Clark campaign was organized around getting ideas across in a way that is not outside the bounds of what was politically plausible," Boaz reminisced in a 2022 interview. "When John Anderson got in [the 1980 presidential race as an independent], we recognized he was going to provide a more prominent third-party choice, maybe taking away our socially liberal, fiscally conservative, well-educated vote, and he ended up getting 6 percent. We just barely got 1 percent. And although we said, 'This is unprecedented, blah blah,' in fact we were very disappointed."

Boaz began working at the Cato Institute when it moved to D.C. in 1981, where he became executive vice president and stayed until his retirement in 2023. He was Cato's leading editorial voice for decades, setting the tone for what was among the most well-financed and widely distributed institutional voices for libertarian advocacy. Cato, with Boaz's guidance, provided a stream of measured, bourgeois outreach policy radicalism intended to appeal to a wide-ranging audience of normal Americans, not just those marinated in specifically libertarian movement heroes, styles, and concerns.

Boaz was, for example, an early voice getting drug legalization taken seriously in citadels of American cultural power with a forward-thinking 1988 New York Times op-ed that concluded presciently: "We can either escalate the war on drugs, which would have dire implications for civil liberties and the right to privacy, or find a way to gracefully withdraw. Withdrawal should not be viewed as an endorsement of drug use; it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cost of this war—billions of dollars, runaway crime rates and restrictions on our personal freedom—is too high."

Boaz wrote what remains the best one-volume discussion of libertarian philosophy and practice for an outward-facing audience, one that while not losing track of practical policy issues also provided a tight, welcoming sense of the philosophical reasons behind libertarian beliefs in avoiding violence as much as possible to settle social or political disputes, published as Libertarianism: A Primer in 1997.

Boaz's book rooted its explanatory style in the American founding, cooperation, personal responsibility, charity, and uncoerced civil society in all its glories. He explained the necessity and purpose of property, profits, entrepreneurship, and how liberty is conducive to an economically healthy and wealthy society, and how government interferes with the growth-producing properties of the system of natural liberty. He discusses the nature and excesses of government in practice and applies libertarian perspectives to many specific policy issues: health care, poverty, the budget, crime, education, even "family values." Boaz's book is thorough, even-toned, erudite, and thoughtful and intended for mass persuasion, not the sour delights of freaking out the normies with your radicalism.

Meeting Boaz in 1991 when I was an intern at Cato (and later an employee until 1994) was bracing to this wet-behind-the-ears young libertarian who arose from a more raffish, perhaps less civilized branch of activism. As a supervisor and colleague, Boaz was a civilized adult, stylish, nearly suave, but was patient nonetheless with wilder young libertarians, of whom he'd dealt with many.

His very institutional continuity—though it was barely two decades long at that point—was influential in a quiet way to the younger crew. It imbued a sense that one needn't frantically demand instant victory, no matter how morally imperative the cause of freedom was. Boaz's calm sense of historical sweep both as a living person and in his capacious knowledge of the history of classical liberal ideas was an antidote to both despair and opportunism for the young libertarians he worked with.

His edited anthology The Libertarian Reader: Classic & Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman—which came out accompanying his primer in 1997—was a compact proof of libertarianism's rich, long tradition, showing how it was in many ways the core animating principle of the American Founding and to a large extent the entire Enlightenment and everything good, just, and rich about the whole Western tradition. The anthology featured the best of libertarian heroes both old and modern, such as Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Constant from previous centuries and Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises from the 20th, as well as providing even wider context with more ancient sources ranging from the Bible to Lao Tzu. He also placed the libertarian tradition rightly as core to the fights for liberation for women and blacks, with entries from Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Angelina and Sarah Grimké.

Asked in 1998 why he chose a career pushing often unpopular and derided ideas up a huge cultural and political hill, Boaz told me: "I think it's satisfying and fun. I believe strongly in these values and at some level I believe it's right to devote your life to fighting for these values, though particularly if you're a libertarian you can't say it's morally obligatory to be fighting for these values—but it does feel right, and at some other level more than just being right, it is fun, it's what I want to do.

"I like intellectual combat, polishing arguments, and I also hate people who want to use force against other people, so a part of it is I am motivated to try to fight these people. I wake up listening to NPR every morning and my partner says, 'Why do you want to wake up angry every morning?' In the first place, I need to know what's going on in the world, and in the second place, dammit, I want to know what these people are up to! It's an outrage what they're up to and I don't want them to get away with it. I want to fight." For decades, at the forefront of the mainstream spread of libertarian attitudes, ideas, and notions, David Boaz did.

The post David Boaz, RIP appeared first on Reason.com.

Season five of showrunner Noah Hawley's TV version of Fargo tells a violence-filled story exploring domestic abuse, PTSD, the concept of debt (on multiple levels), and the purpose and efficacy of the institutions of marriage and police.

Its villain is designed to cause discomfort for libertarians: Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), who self-identifies as a libertarian and a constitutionalist, and does seem to adhere to a certain peculiar right-wing belief in the county sheriff as the main source of authority. The only libertarianish qualities he evinces are a contempt for the FBI and the ability to recite a few silly, pointless laws. But the writers seem to want his stated ideology to add spice to the audience's dislike of him for being an abusing, murdering, and corrupt bully laundering his own rage and sin through a twisted vision of God.

In one scene, Tillman says he'd rather see orphans fight each other for sport than help them, and another character accuses him of being like a baby—crying for freedom with no responsibility. The whole thing is reminiscent of when on old college pal thinks he is totally crushing libertarianism with a masterful Facebook post.

If Tillman becomes smart quality TV fans' go-to image of libertarians, replacing the weirdly obsessed but well-meaning Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation, it will be a shame. But hopefully a smart viewer will know, when Tillman calls on the spirit of western resisters of federal power such as Ammon Bundy and LaVoy Finicum, that it's no part of any proven public record that either man ever did anything a hundredth as evil as Tillman does in pretty much every episode.

The post Review: <i>Fargo</i>'s Self-Identified Libertarian Is No Libertarian appeared first on Reason.com.