Two American-born citizens with military experience, one a veteran, the other a current soldier, committed public mayhem at the beginning of the new year: veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar in New Orleans and decorated Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger in Las Vegas—the former case being much more destructive and lethal. Both events raise troubling questions about what caused these individuals to act as they did (from what we know). The causes are likely complex. There may be, in each case, a cause that can be called the major one, but it is doubtful that we can ever isolate a single sine-qua-non cause.
This is not how politics (the process by which people are governed on a day-to-day basis) typically approaches the issue. Consider the following as alternative major causes:
The president-elect of the United States chose the fourth explanation—see “Trump Doubles Down on Border Security Amid Domestic Terror Unease,” Wall Street Journal, January 2, 2025:
On Thursday, even after it was shown that 42-year old Shamsud-Din Jabbar wasn’t in the rented truck when it crossed the border, Trump still blamed the current administration.
“With the Biden ‘Open Border’s Policy’ I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe,” Trump wrote Thursday. “That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.”
An ancient philosopher would struggle to identify this declaration with a state pursuing the “social good.” What I have called “simplistic public policy” seems to be a standard output of politics, when it’s not simply arbitrary nonsense as William Riker might have said. Public choice theory tries to explain why. James Buchanan, one of the main conceptors of this strand of analysis, also developed a model of the state in which there is a stage (the “constitutional stage”) where politics can be rational and beneficial as a multiparty exchange where each and every individual holds a veto on the rules constraining day-to-day politics. Whether one agrees or not with this justification of the state, it is an impressive attempt to reconcile politics and liberty.
Of the possible major causes I listed above, No. 1 seems the most rational. A quite remarkable Wall Street Journal report just raised the issue of military men or veterans involved in acts of public violence (Vera Bergengruen, Nancy A. Youssef, and Tawnell D. Hobbs, “‘I Only Knew How to Do One Thing’: New Year’s Violence Resurrects the Dark Side of Military Life,” January 6, 2025:
“Transitioning out of the service is probably one of the most challenging things an individual could do,” said retired Army Lt. Col. Sam Andrews, who is on the board of directors for Bravo Zulu House, a transitional living facility for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction. “We lose our sense of purpose, we lose our sense of tribe, we lose our sense of meaning.” …
According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or Start, almost 16% of extremists who have committed criminal offenses in the U.S. since 1990 had military backgrounds.
As argued by Hayek, the “sense of tribe,” to which collectivism (and nationalism) represents the modern form, is a mortal enemy of the free society. The military defenders of a free society should instead be instilled with a sense of individualism, a difficult task if that sentiment has become shunned in society. And how is this compatible with what is required from soldiers facing individual death? Certainly, the defenders of a free society should not be trained as “killing machines,” notwithstanding what Mr. Trump wrote in a 2019 tweet. These considerations raise a Gordian knot of related problems, which include “forever wars,” the need to defend liberty by force against international thugs, and perhaps the unavoidability of some militarily powerful and freedom-oriented state capable of informally playing a role of international gendarme given the extreme danger if not the impossibility of a world state. An alliance of states representing free or hopefully mostly-free individuals like NATO may be another part of the puzzle’s solution (see my libertarian fable on that).
Raw political utterances are not the solution.
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