The latest Dexter miniseries, about the quasi-heroic serial killer who kills other serial killers, reached its climax around the same time Vice President JD Vance posted “I don’t give a shit what you call it” in response to one of the liberal writers known as the Krassenstein Twins condemning the U.S.’s killing of a boatful of alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers as a “war crime” (not to be confused with the Gemini Killer condemning Dexter at a council of serial killers in a recent episode).
What ostensibly makes Dexter better than the other serial killers is that, although he plainly operates outside the law, he has a “code” under which he can’t kill innocents, only murderers. Perhaps Vance would see Dexter as a kindred spirit, someone who gets things done without fretting over little things like written law (perhaps Trump even has something similar in mind when he occasionally mumbles the cryptic, disturbing incantation “The late, great Hannibal Lecter,” but who knows). Vance and other U.S. politicians are supposed to adhere to an even more civilized code than Dexter’s, though, namely the U.S. Constitution, for all its flaws.
I mean, I’d prefer there were no government at all, but an unconstrained, uninhibited government isn’t a step closer to the good kind of anarchism, nor a step toward creating a world of Dexter-like or Batman-like vigilante heroes. As long as government exists, we should want it to behave cautiously and predictably, not just blow up anyone it perceives as bad for society, even if they’re beyond the borders to which U.S. law normally applies.
Most of us, especially those with some right-leaning tendencies, can sympathize with a bit of cowboy swagger in the rhetoric around combating criminals or foreign foes. But if there’s anyone remaining on the right with libertarian tendencies or even, Heaven forbid, some classical liberal respect for the rule of law and proper procedures, they ought to be at least a little nervous about the swaggering rhetoric giving way to actual explosions and deaths combined with a dismissive attitude toward law—especially if the underlying offense is drug use and drug commerce, not an imminent terrorist attack demanding immediate action.
The handful of libertarians who supported Trump might want to watch their backs if a law-flouting Trump regime decides to start preemptively killing anyone with ties to the drug trade. True, some conservatives—and even one libertarian, if you count Vivek Ramaswamy—might argue that the drug in question, fentanyl, is special, since it’s often adulterated with more dangerous substances, and thus that shipping it to the U.S. is like lobbing bombs or stealthy poison at the country.
But then, the government says that sort of thing about each newly-popular drug, and eventually that fad goes away and users, virtually all of them still alive however damaged a few might be, turn to some other drug. We shouldn’t be trying to lawlessly bomb every perceived threat to the social fabric. (How does former drug-trade-facilitating ex-convict Ross Ulbricht, freed by Trump to cheers from some in the Libertarian Party, feel about Trump killing a dozen people from his industry?)
No matter how immense the toll of alcohol abuse in the U.S., I trust no one any longer believes resurrecting Prohibition is the answer. It would be downright terrifying if the Trump administration decided to enforce a new era of alcohol prohibition with jet fighter attacks on disobedient bars. The toll in Trump hangouts like New York City, D.C., and Mar-a-Lago might be particularly high.
In the years immediately following 9/11, people of a neoconservative bent—and for a short time, that meant most of us in one sense or another, even if we technically remained anarchists—were inclined to defend, if not the Bushes, at least the fictional Jack Bauer, the often law-transgressing anti-terrorist agent on the action series 24. You’d better behave like Jack, went the argument, if the alternative was a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city.
Fair enough, but one shouldn’t constantly and routinely seek out situations that can only be resolved the Jack Bauer way. That’s not heroism, it’s an admission that you don’t care about law or good behavior anymore and that if horror now ensues, your attitude will be: what you gonna do about it, pal?
No matter how much fun some people—even Gavin Newsom lately—have imitating Trump’s wisecracks, nuance and careful thought is still called for in politics, not just a gut-level edict such as “Police harder!” (as many MAGA bros might be inclined to think when looking with understandable horror at crime’s toll), nor for that matter “Police less, maybe police not at all” (as many New Yorkers may well think if they’re about to put Mamdani in the mayor’s mansion).
Things exploding can be very satisfying, but maybe the government of a country that apparently loves consuming fentanyl has no more business killing the people who supply it than that government does taxing fattening foods or banning cigarettes, two policies the right strongly opposed the last time I checked. Blowing people up is surely a more drastic imposition of big government on society than putting a surtax on Ring Dings, though I’d greatly prefer government did neither.
I don’t know quite what the future will bring if we’re flailing about in this authoritarian fashion over every problem that arises, but New York’s prestigious debate society Open to Debate hosting a debate last week on whether the country needs (or perhaps already has) a “national CEO” with essentially unlimited, dictatorial powers, strikes me as a bad sign.
My fellow 1990s Brown alum Curtis Yarvin, for decades just an obscure crank (though one who cited me in a footnote once, so I hate sounding like an ingrate) and lately seen as a prophet of the New Right, made the argument in favor of a national CEO—but then, Yarvin likes autocrats so much and so badly misunderstands libertarianism that he thinks the Chilean dictator Pinochet was philosophically superior to libertarians, since Pinochet ostensibly understood that emergency situations will arise from time to time making strict adherence to libertarian principles difficult or even impossible.
Well, many principles are tricky to enforce without being thereby consigned to the scrapheap. If liberty works over 90 percent of the time, maybe devote more mental energy to coming up with ways to cope with the other 10 percent without rushing to install a dictator. And the non-dictatorial solutions will probably work even better. If there is a slippery slope by which too loosey-goosey a libertarian society can slip into criminal chaos and welfare-statism, surely we’ve also seen that there’s an adjacent slippery slope by which a society that loves to bomb drug boats—or, to use a favorite tactic of the Pinochet fans, throw leftist militants to their deaths from helicopters—can descend into tyranny.
Not every budding Pinochet is interested in taking economic advice from some libertarian like Milton Friedman, either, so don’t be too quick to assume there are any goodies forthcoming to compensate for all the truncheon blows. Trump and Vance, for instance, don’t seem too interested in fostering a world of free trade on the high seas after they’re done with the bombing and taxing. How quaint and non-threatening Dexter now seems by comparison, heading out to sea in his powerboat, his strange conscience rightly troubled by the acts he has committed in the name of justice, in a way that our rulers’ consciences may not be.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey