David McElroy

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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If you were a slave owner in the United States in the 19th century, you probably owed your wealth and continued income to the continuation of slavery. If someone made the case to you that slavery was morally wrong, your first thought probably would have been, “But if we free the slaves, who will pick the cotton?”

The idea of ending slavery was a scary thing to many people in Europe and North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many people owned human beings who had been brought from Africa in chains. Those people worked in their fields and did all sorts of manual labor for them. The idea was deeply ingrained in society and it was accepted by many people as right and moral.

The abolition movement was a challenge to all of that. The abolitionists didn’t try to explain to plantation owners how they could earn a living after the slaves were freed. They couldn’t offer completely pragmatic plans for how society was going to go through the transition from slavery to universal equality of rights among races.

They simply made the case that slavery was a moral abomination. Some of them used gentle persuasion. Some of them preached fiery sermons, but still advocated peaceful change. And some, such as John Brown, tried to spark slave rebellions through violent means.

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