Libertarian Community Performances, an Inherently Broken Fourth Wall
Creators: name: Belback, Daniel Joseph
Publisher: name: University of Chicago
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: democratic labor
subject: alienation
subject: participatory democracy
subject: libertarianism
subject: boundaries
subject: discourse
subject: symbolic interactionism
subject: spatio-temporal sequences
subject: online-offline
subject: ideology
subject: social processes
subject: social conflict
subject: metapragmatics
subject: rural sociology
subject: political sociology
subject: individualism
subject: collectivism
subject: intentional community

description: The following thesis analyzes the interactions of the Free Town Project (FTP), an offshoot libertarian utopic endeavor inside the larger Free State Project (FSP), with locals in the town of Grafton, N.H. The group sought to take over the town politically and remake it in the image of orthodox libertarianism. Initially, the founding of the FTP online is analyzed to gain an idea of members' expectations, ideologies, and practiced interaction styles. The Web Archives or WayBackMachine is utilized to analyze websites, forums, and announcements of the FTP and FSP in the 2000s and early 2010s. Utilizing ATLAS.ti, 238 pages of Deliberative Session (Town Meeting) minutes are read, coded, and analyzed from 2000 - 2021. 98 codes (c) are established, 397 are applied (a), and 17 code groups (g) are established around themes. Other data utilized includes warrant articles, voting results, tax records, voter estimates, personal websites, and local news reports. The work uncovers boundary demarcation processes through observing deliberative session interactions and warrant article introductions by the FTP. The work shows that the relative success of the FTP in Grafton was considered a social strain by local deliberative session participants or civil sphere/(society) actors. It is found that locals were highly embedded and reliant on the democratic process in Grafton and saw FTP success as an existential and alienating threat to their meaningful democratic labors and practices. Initially, the group was unsuccessful at passing its agenda and so alienation was only possible. In 2013 the FTP organized successfully under new leadership and gamified the deliberative session. The FTP began practicing its ideology much more overtly, in an increasingly similar way to what it had outlined online. The FTP successfully passed a 10% budget reduction in the process that was ultimately voted down during the town wide election. Importantly, it is found that their actions threw off the sacred deliberative session interaction ritual, alienating locals from their democratic labors and practices. Losing control of this ritual and the losses’ subsequent effects was real alienation from democratic labor for locals. This caused an intense backlash from locals opposed to the FTP. This could be seen most vividly in skyrocketing deliberative session participation, warrant articles mocking the FTP, increased taxation, and charged interactions defending local public servants. The social conflict had the effect of hardening boundaries. Moreover, it ensured the FTP would never reach its goal of instantiating its ideology into the governance of Grafton. The thesis shows that online libertarian ideology can indeed be offloaded and practiced similarly in an interactional setting such as a deliberative session. However, the work indicates that its practice is mediated by organization, leadership, and perceived success. In other words, FTP members began to act increasingly like their orthodox online libertarian personas as they transformed the interactional style of the deliberative session. The thesis also illustrates the potent effect of perceived alienation from democratic labor in contexts practicing localized participatory democracy. It can galvanize people, harden boundaries, and cause intense social conflict. Civil Sphere Theory notes that the perception and subsequent profanation of anti-democratic strains can have this effect, causing Societalization or the repair of an anti-democratic strain by the civil sphere (Alexander, 2006; Alexander, 2018). This thesis strengthens and challenges that work by showing such processes can occur in rural communities around highly localized strains. It also moves away from abstracted cultural binaries and instead shows the process in relation to democratic labor practices, while empirically demonstrating its performance. This creates a much more bottom up and grassroots approach through the utilization of deliberative session minutes and YouTube videos of direct interactions. By including democratic labor as a sacred object for those practicing it, the thesis also shows the very wide set of people who can be galvanized by the threat of alienation from it.