David McElroy

The people in this picture are among the Occupy rioters in Seattle on May Day. They’re breaking windows and destroying private property. (Click the picture for a bigger view.) Based on the “anarchy” logo they were plastering on the property they were destroying, I’m sure they believe they’re anarchists. They’re not. They’re just vandals and criminals.

I wrote at length earlier about the fact that those who want a government to enforce their political views aren’t really anarchists, so I won’t repeat most of that here. I only want to say that if you’re the kind of vandal who dresses in black and destroys private property, that doesn’t make you some anarchist hero. It just makes you a punk and a vandal who’s destroying things that don’t belong to you.

The coercive state is the enemy. The people in the streets Tuesday agree that the current state is the enemy, but most of them want something far worse — a new coercive state that would be even more monstrous than what we already have. They’re not anarchists. They’re Bolsheviks intent on giving the Soviet Union another try.

Most people don’t have any idea what anarchists are — and that includes some of the people who use the word to describe themselves. If you listen to what some of these people believe, you realize they’re not anarchists. They’re just punks who like to dress in black and break other people’s property.

I’ve written before about the need for a more effective label to describe those of us who oppose the coercive state and believe there are better ways to organize society voluntarily. I sometimes tell people that I’m an anarchist who hangs out in the libertarian camp. Other times, I’ve used the anarcho-capitalist label. I’ve tried voluntaryist, but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue well, either.

To be an anarchist, one must oppose the coercive state. Beyond that, there are different flavors of anarchism, many of which directly contradict one another. Since the very definition of anarchy is a negative — the absence of a coercive state — it doesn’t tell us what a person favors. It’s what you favor in place of the state that ultimately matters most.

The five men who were arrested in Ohio Tuesday for plotting to blow up a bridge call themselves anarchists, but it seems that their real complaints are with private companies rather than with the state. Based on the sketchy information I’ve been able to read about them so far, they sound like most everybody else on the progressive left. They’ve certainly been a part of the Occupy movement, which isn’t surprising since their leftist politics sounds a lot like what I hear from most of the Occupy supporters.

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If you listen to political pundits, the people who matter most in American politics are the swing voters. They’re the ones in the middle who sometimes vote for Democrats and sometimes “swing” to Republicans. I’m going to tell you why swing voters are really just suckers who get fooled every time.

There are some voters who are reliably with one party or the other. There’s a coalition of progressive left groups who are always going to vote for Democrats. There’s a coalition of social conservatives and economic conservatives who are always going to vote for Republicans. With few exceptions, the people in those groups are generally happy when their side is in power.

Then there are people who don’t fit into either of the mainstream camps. A lot of those people are libertarians (self-identified or otherwise) and a lot of them are simply moderates who don’t want to see either side of the mainstream become too dominant. And then there are people who don’t really know that much about what they believe, but they just don’t really like either side of the mainstream.

It’s the people in those middle groups who push elections one way or the other — as they swing from one mainstream party to the other. They were with Barack Obama in 2008, because they wanted almost any Democrat after eight years of George W. Bush, but they swung to Republicans heavily in 2010 congressional elections, because they didn’t like it that Obama had been doing what anybody should have known he was going to do as president.

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