For my part, I’ve always found something unsatisfying about all the explanatory frameworks. I don’t think history, politics, sociology, or psychology provide a satisfactory account. I don’t think this is all an accident. I think there’s something else at the core that determines the affinity between libertarianism and fascism. This was what I was trying to grasp in 2017 when I wrote about Rothbard in the wake of Charlottesville and said that they were both united by the notion of naked, brutal self-interest: radical libertarians believed this on an individual level, fascists, on the collective level, and it was not hard to switch between the two. Many commentators—both pro- and anti-capitalist—have noticed the analogy between the invisible hand of the market and a Social Darwinian “state of nature.”
Rothbard, in his discussion of Robert Brasillach, used the biography by William Tucker, The Fascist Ego. As Rothbard seemed to faintly recognize, the fascist ego and the radical, “anarchist” libertarian ego are identical on a structural level, that is to say, they are the same form of subjectivity in different moments. That is not to say that every single fascist is a libertarian or vice versa, or that they exactly have the same psychological origin story. What they both share is a fundamental misrecognition of the Other: the other is just a thing, some material for exploitation or domination. As such, they cannot understand and fundamentally distrust anything that doesn’t openly declare a relation between self and others that is non-exploitative or based on non-domination. They both cannot recognize any universal interest, only the wars and temporary alliances of particular interests, be they individuals, nations, or races. To put it somewhat differently, their universal is just the particular, it becomes the Absolute. Libertarians like to say, “Well, we hate the state, while fascists worship the state.” But this is merely a semantic game. The state as fascists understand it is not the state as liberals and socialists understand it: as the sphere where pluralistic, particular interests are reconciled for the general good. They have no such ideal. They view the state instead as a crude vehicle or weapon for the movement or the race. And neither have any conception of “citizenship” as conventionally understood, a set of inalienable rights: citizenship is a mutable and revocable thing like employment, based on the notion of one’s productive contribution to the whole.