“I don’t want to say that liberaltarianism is dead. But is it endangered? Sure. It deserves to be.” ~ Jason Kuznicki

I think the hopes placed in the Obama administration by libertarians have been fairly well dashed at this point.  On civil-liberties issues and on economic issues, the President has not gone nearly far enough to end the bad practices of the last administration, or to promote anything like market solutions to the many problems facing the country.  Jason goes on to write:

If libertarians seem more conservative lately, it’s not only that we’ve been pushed away by the left. Attendees at this year’s CPAC ranked “reducing size of federal government” and “reducing government spending” as by far their highest policy priorities. They also chose Ron Paul as their preferred presidential candidate. Those same attendees even booed speaker Ryan Sorba for condemning gay Republicans:

I’m not sure the left-libertarian alliance was ever really meant to be anything more than a fragile oppositional alliance to the big-spenders masquerading as conservatives during the Bush years, united by a common antipathy over the wars and the infringements upon civil liberties.  I know Mark has hopes that a populist left-right alliance could rise from the ashes of the current establishment, but I see the fundamental divide between Tea Partiers and progressives as too wide a gap for anything but a similarly tenuous & oppositional alliance.

[Read more →]

Jonah Goldberg has a very smart response to Jim Manzi’s reflections on “liberty-as-means” libertarians vs. “liberty-as-goal” libertarians.  I want to focus on Jonah’s post here, but you should read Manzi as well.  Jonah writes:

My own view is that the Right is intellectually healthier and more creative because its dogma remains unsettled (yes, I’ve written about this a zillion times). The Right is divided between those who are (in Irving Kristol’s formulation) anti-left and those who are anti-State. Those who believe that the government is bad because it’s working from leftist assumptions, and those who believe that the government is bad because it is the government. (Most conservatives share both outlooks to one extent or another, but usually fit more into one camp than the other. If you’re wholly in the government-is-bad camp you’re more properly a libertarian, but still on the right). There are those who believe that liberty is an end and those who believe that liberty is a means. For more than a half century now, modern conservatives have been debating and redebating the question of where to the draw the lines between freedom and order, liberty and virtue. And because that line continually needs to be redrawn given the evolution of attitudes, changes in technology, etc, conservative intellectuals (though not necessarily conservative activists, politicians and the like) are constantly revisiting first principles and philosophical assumptions or are at least capable of acknowledging the good faith of their philosophical opponents). I do not think you can say the same thing about liberals (again, as a wild generalization). What unites most, if not all, factions of the Left, from socialists to DLC moderates is a dogmatic acceptance that the government should do good when it can and where it can.  Hence the debates on the left tend to be procedural, wonkish, and technical or rankly political. The Right has such arguments as well, of course. But they do not define and dominate political discussions the way they do on the left. And that’s because our dogma is still unsettled.

I think this strikes upon a number of smart observations.  Certainly the continual re-drawing of the many lines between liberty and virtue, freedom and order, etc. is exactly the reason I enjoy reading (intellectual) conservative blogs so much more than I enjoy reading liberal blogs.  On the flip side, I think the best wonkish blogs and writers are found in the liberal corner.

Perhaps this reveals not only the strengths on both sides of the political aisle, but also the weaknesses.

I like thinking of conservatism in these terms – as an “unsettled ideology.” This gets at the bohemian conservatism I was talking about last week.  Russell Kirk was a self-described “bohemian Tory” and I think the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, with its distrust of centralized power and so forth fits that term nicely, if the red-meat activist wing does not.  The “unsettled dogma” concept seems so far removed from the conservative movement’s attempts at purity tests and activism that it’s a bit hard to reconcile the two.  And of course I’ve always been more attracted to the intellectual struggles within the ideology than with the political processes themselves, healthcare blogging notwithstanding.  But I think this can also be a trap for conservative intellectuals, or at least for bloggers with an intellectual streak (I am not really an intellectual as far as I know). More conservatives need to focus on policy and wonkishness if only to provide their ideas with a tangible foundation, but also because the effort to dismantle or reinvent the welfare state – to really limit big government – requires if anything even more policy and wonkishness than the other side.

 

Addendum: I’d like to point out that I in no way endorse some of the more caricatured views Goldberg expresses here vis-a-vis liberals.  Gross generalizations are not really my cup of tea, whether they can be applied to certain people within the larger group or not.  I will, however, note that so far the conservative and liberal response here has been hostile.  That means I’m doing something right.  Re: purity tests and so forth, it’s not so much that ideological groups shouldn’t set out some standards for membership, but that the standards become awfully silly and rigid in a political climate like the one we now have.

Memo to the conservatives who suddenly discovered that they were in favor of limited government when George Bush left office: if you want people to believe that your conversion is real, it would probably help if you don’t whine and complain about Big Government Obama (see also: Ed Driscoll, AJ Strata) when he actually proposes a cut to a program that you just so happen to like.  Either you’re for limited government, or your not.  You don’t get to pick and choose the areas where you think limited government is good and bad and still claim to be an advocate for limited government on the whole. 

Say what you will about the various proposals for health care reform, at least they have a goal in mind that is intended to help people in the here and now that are, in fact, hurting.  But what, exactly, is a mission to the moon supposed to accomplish in the here and now that makes it so necessary to keep in the federal budget at a time when we’re running unprecedented budget deficits? 

Either you’re for limited government, or you’re against it.  Being for it only when the Democrats try to create a program you don’t like, and against it whenever they cut a program that you do like….well, it kinda sends a mixed message.  It also has a tendency to result in y’all not caring too much about fiscal restraint when you actually do return to power, one day.  And, one day, you can rest assured, you will in fact return to power, probably even one day soon.  It would be rather helpful to the cause of limited government if, when you return to power, you didn’t seem to care more about expanding the programs that you do like than about cutting the programs that you don’t.  It kinda makes it a bit more difficult to fight the Democrats when they’re in power on limited government grounds when you insist on fighting for the expansion of government when we’re talking about your pet projects.  And right now: YOU’RE NOT HELPING!

Sincerely,

The Libertarians

It is impossible to understand politics in the United States over the last 12 months without some in-depth discussion of the impact of the Tea Party movement.  Over the course of the last several days, I had the good fortune to engage in a dialogue with Stephen Gordon about a wide range of Tea Party-related topics, including what the Tea Party movements are about, where they’re going, what their influence has been and will be, and whether there is the possibility of a right-left alliance under the Tea Party umbrella.  There are, frankly, few people as qualified as Gordon to discuss these topics, as he’s been partying with tea since long before it was cool, having helped organize a successful state-level Tea Party in Alabama as early as 2003.  Gordon has also been heavily involved in libertarian politics for a number of years, including acting as Communications Director for Michael Badnarik’s 2004 campaign, and e-Campaign manager for Bob Barr’s 2008 campaign.  Recently, he’s appeared several times on the Rachel Maddow Show, and contributes to several well-regarded blogs, including the Liberty Papers, the Next Right, and Examiner.com.  He is now the Director of Media Relations for the political consulting firm Forward Focus Media.

MT: It’s quite clear that the Tea Party movement is primarily a grassroots-based movement without any clear leaders.  Moreover, although the Tea Party movement seems to be primarily focused on government spending, there have been numerous documented Tea Party-affiliated protests focusing on anything from the Democratic health care reform bills to illegal immigration.  Is there any kind of coordination of message that takes place within the movement, and if not, what would you say is the common theme that runs through all of the Tea Party organizations?

SG: This is a point I tried to make the other night on Rachel Maddow’s show.  If there had been enough time to elaborate, I would have stated because these are grassroots operations led in many places by people with no political experience, they are ripe for takeovers by established political organizations.  Obviously, organizations taking over elements of the movement have their own agendas. What I see most often is an attempt to guide the Tea Party movement to do what they initially opposed: re-electing politics-as-normal big-government Republicans.

 To me, healthcare is a very relevant topic for Tea Parties.  Immigration, abortion, foreign policy or even reform of marijuana laws, not so much.  I’ve been vocal about this in the past.  

Because of the nature of the movement, top-down coordination of the message can’t be planned by Karl Rove.  This also means that each Tea Party event or organization will have a slightly different flavor.  If I was in charge of the movement, my message would be one of fiscal responsibility. This encompasses deficit spending, corporate bailouts, stimulus packages, the current health care legislation, etc.  To a great degree, this is also the message of my Tea Party groups I’ve encountered. This, in my opinion, is a good thing.

MT: How do the Tea Parties overcome this problem of co-option, which seems to infect grassroots movements of all political stripes?  Is some sort of organized – and independent – top-down leadership eventually going to be necessary, or can the Tea Parties maintain their momentum without maintaining a narrow focus on fiscal issues?

SG: I’d offer any Tea Party organization the same general advice. First of all, stick to a single or narrow range of issues.  Every time a new, and especially an unrelated, issue is introduced the movement will lose supporters. Second, develop organic lists. Make sure you obtain e-mail addresses, phone numbers, etc. at every event and from as many website visits as possible. Third, don’t let them take you over but make them come to you. Alabama Tea Party activists just held a gubernatorial debate and straw poll and their favorite candidate was made apparent. Had that particular movement been co-opted, I’m sure the result would have been different. 

While the laws  vary by location, if any local movement becomes large or influential enough, state and federal laws are eventually going to force some legal organizational entity to be formed. This will require a bit more top-down approach in some regard, but hopefully the Tea Party groups will be very mindful of the grassroots activists who made their organizations possible in the first place.

MT:Changing gears slightly, many commentators certainly have questioned where the Tea Partiers’ anger was during the Bush Administration’s spending orgies, not to mention the bank bailouts.  This isn’t to say that all of the Tea Partiers can be accused of suddenly discovering their passions when the Democrats took over in Washington – obviously, libertarians like you and your old boss Bob Barr, not to mention Ron Paul’s legions, have been banging this drum for a long while.  But why has the rise of the Tea Parties seemingly coincided with the Democrats – and President Obama - obtaining overwhelming power in Washington? [Read more →]

A few months ago, I recommended Jason Kuznicki’s excellent article on America’s history of state-sanctioned racial discrimination. In it, Kuznicki discusses the relationship between government regulations and social prejudice (emphasis mine):

In a mobile and egalitarian commercial republic influenced by Christianity, practicing racism ought to be difficult. It becomes much easier, however, when there are legally established definitions of race and when outcomes and opportunities are clearly bound to racial identity. Laws to this effect work to fix definitions of race in the public mind, even if these definitions don’t map well onto physiological reality.

Law reifies race. Racialized laws are likely to be enacted by lawmakers who were racists to begin with, but their continued existence also makes racism easier to practice in the future, whether in the public sector, the private sector, or even the confines of one’s own mind.

In a new article from Southern Spaces, we see this dynamic at work in turn-of-the-century Atlanta, where white residents sought to exclude blacks from a desirable neighborhood in the Fourth Ward:

White home-owning residents of the Fourth Ward went to considerable lengths to push through the relocation of Morris Brown, a major African American institution in the hopes that the black populace would follow. They organized meetings between white political leadership and school and African Methodist Episcopal Church officials. They offered cash. They offered land. And black Fourth Warders declined each.

Faced with effective black resistance, Jackson Hill’s white home-owning residents met in October 1910 to delineate a fourteen block area in the neighborhood with a racial boundary line and, as the Atlanta Constitution reported, “put the public and all real estate developers on notice that the sale or renting of property within the white territory [specified] would be considered a reprehensible and unfriendly act.”

Brow-beating realtors and bribing black residents to leave didn’t work, so the neighborhood turned to government-enforced housing discrimination to get rid of the undesirables:

When black families continued renting and purchasing homes within Jackson Hill, whites adopted tactics common throughout the urban South and increasingly utilized in the urban North; in 1913 they proposed a city ordinance outlining racial residential segregation procedures.

At the risk of over-generalizing, I think this scenario raises a few interesting questions about libertarian and conservative thinking on race and discrimination. To a cosmopolitan libertarian, the idea that racism in the United States is the product of state-sanctioned discrimination is no doubt an attractive one: it puts the onus of Jim Crow on the state instead of civil society. In turn-of-the-century Atlanta, however, the chain of causation starts with individuals and private homeowner associations: the 1913 city ordinance segregating residential neighborhoods was preceded by private efforts to eject black residents and was the result of what, in retrospect, could plausibly be described as grassroots pressure. Kuznicki acknowledges that state discrimination doesn’t spring fully-formed from some deracinated political vacuum, but I was surprised by the intensity of racial animosity exhibited by white homeowners before the state officially endorsed housing segregation.

A few further questions: First, what if cash bribes and social pressures had been enough to segregate the Fourth Ward? Does a turn-of-the-century conservative/libertarian simply look the other way, perhaps frowning on Atlantans’ retrograde social habits but nonetheless allowing that they have the right to create lily-white neighborhoods through non-coercive means?

On the other hand, the Southern Spaces article suggests that integrated neighborhoods held up surprisingly well despite (or perhaps because of) social pressures. Black families wouldn’t be bribed into leaving their homes.  “Reprehensible and unfriendly” or not, Atlanta’s real estate developers continued to sell property to black families. You often hear that economic logic trumps the psychology of discrimination – perhaps there’s some truth to this after all.

Despite the occasional lapse into liberal condescension, The New Yorker’s profile of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, the new age-y libertarian whose Wall Street Journal health care op-ed sparked massive protests last summer, is pretty interesting. Reason is also running a Mackey interview.

Jane Hamsher has been taking a lot of flak in recent days for coming out against the Senate health care reform bill as well as for suggesting that “both the [progressive opponents] and the tea party activists are saying almost the exact same thing about the Senate bill” and that the ”painfully obvious left/right transpartisan consensus that is coalescing against DC insiders of both parties appears to be taking everyone by surprise.”  Although not actively opposing the final Senate bill, Glenn Greenwald offered similar sentiments about the common ground between the Tea Partiers and the far left, noting:

Whether you call it “a government takeover of the private sector” or a “private sector takeover of government,” it’s the same thing:  a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else’s expense.  Growing anger over that is rooted far more in an insider/outsider dichotomy over who controls Washington than it is in the standard conservative/liberal ideological splits from the 1990s.  It’s true that the people who are angry enough to attend tea parties are being exploited and misled by GOP operatives and right-wing polemicists, but many of their grievances about how Washington is ignoring their interests are valid, and the Democratic Party has no answers for them because it’s dependent upon and supportive of that corporatist model.  That’s why they turn to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh; what could a Democratic Party dependent upon corporate funding and subservient to its interests possibly have to say to populist anger?

Hamsher then followed through on her assertions by agreeing to take her case to Fox News, for which she was criticized as being “naive.” Finally, today we learn that she has teamed up with none other than Grover Norquist to call for Rahm Emanuel’s resignation due to his actions with respect to Fannie and Freddie.  The criticisms of Hamsher and to a lesser extent Greenwald, have been echoed by several of my fellow Gents here at the League. 

Underlying these criticisms of Hamsher seems to be an assumption that: 1. From a liberal perspective, it is inarguable that the Senate bill at least makes things better; 2.  Hamsher is insane for finding common ground with Tea Partiers in opposition to bailouts that were sold as necessary to prevent a Great Depression; and 3. Hamsher is insane for thinking the Tea Partiers have any actual common ground with her, and that they may actually have similar values to her. 

The first two of these criticisms, however, demonstrate precisely why Hamsher and Greenwald are ultimately correct about the common ground with the Tea Partiers.  Specifically, these criticisms assume that “the experts” are always right, and that the average voter is unqualified to assess the normative merits of a particular government action.  So, the message is sent that progressives like Hamsher should STFU since Paul Krugman thinks that the bill, while imperfect, is at least an improvement from the status quo.  Similarly, on the bailouts, Hamsher (as well as, I assume, all the Dem legislators that voted against them last year) should STFU and support them because the experts say things would have been really, really bad without them [NOTE: I am not offering an opinion here as to my thoughts on TARP].  In each case, Hamsher is expected to weigh the acknowledged normative costs less than the claimed normative costs because, well, she’s neither an expert nor an insider; she’s dismissed as being unrealistic and unserious merely for assigning different moral weight to the acknowledged normative costs from the experts.  Unfortunately, last I checked, being an expert economist or scientist doesn’t give one authority to tell people how to make moral calculations. 

[Read more →]

New Mexico’s former governor sounds like a pretty great candidate.

Sometime last summer I announced that I was reading Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and that I’d try to post evaluations as I went. Well, due to a string of events I won’t relate here, I put the book aside for a few months, but picked it back up last week and I’ve now finished it. I’m so glad I did: if there are other books of political philosophy out there that are as delightful to read as this one, I’d like to get my hands on them. Nozick peppers his argument with stray questions and thought experiments, any one of which could provide enough material for a late-night philosophy argument. On top of that, he admits his doubts and points out weaknesses in his own argument, which is a pretty admirable way of writing. So even though I wasn’t a libertarian when I started the book and I’m not a libertarian now, I can say it’s well worth reading.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Anarchy, State, and Utopia, it’s Nozick’s 1974 work of libertarian political philosophy, written in part to respond to John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Nozick shores up and extend lines of argument from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690), arguing that nothing more than a minimal state — i.e., one which does nothing more than protect its citizens from murder, theft, fraud, etc. — can be justified. One great virtue of the book, at least from the perspective of a non-libertarian, is that Nozick is much more interested in the argument than the application, and he never lets a policy preference get in the way of structural clarity. This isn’t to say that he doesn’t have policy preferences, only that the book is not about policy, and indeed, as I’ll argue below, probably doesn’t do enough to get us from philosophy to policy.
[Read more →]

I’m not a huge Ayn Rand fan, but GQ really should hire someone a bit more coherent to write their obligatory libertarian smack-down. I mean, it just isn’t very fun if the author is a bad Matt Taibbi knock-off with approximately zero interest in Rand, libertarians, or economics.

The forthcoming issue* of Reason features an exceedingly thoughtful essay by Kerry Howley, in which she argues that libertarianism would be well-served by widening its scope and paying far more attention to infringements on liberty that are the product of cultural forces.  It’s an argument familiar to those of us versed in sociological or anthropological discourse: namely, that systematic cultural conditions can have just as much of an impact on restricting individual liberty as any expansion of the state’s power.  In the process of defending Howley’s critique, Will Wilkinson notes that a fair number of libertarians don’t really seem to get the core substance of Howley’s point:

If you think cultural products such as political ideologies evolve over time, you won’t see the content of “libertarianism” as sharply defined and fixed once and for all. To assert, as Ilya does, that “some cultural issues might well be appropriate object of concern for libertarians as thinking individuals, but not a proper focus for libertarianism,” pretty much begs the question. The claim is that these cultural issues ought to be objects of concern to libertarians because they are matters of liberty that libertarian have overlooked. Kerry’s asking libertarians to care more about the conditions under which people develop the capacity to meaningfully exercise freedom. She’s asking libertarians to not so blithely assume that social relations of exploitation and domination enforced by state power for hundreds of years are no longer matters of liberty simply because the enforcement of longstanding racist and sexist norms was privatized a few decades ago. She’s not asking libertarians to save the whales.

As you’re wondering why it is that so many commentators have had a hard time getting Kerry’s core point, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that libertarianism – as a political movement – is overwhelmingly white and male.  We tend to think of the racial composition of a political movement as just having electoral consequences, but it also has a profound effect on the core ideology of said movement.  At the risk of oversimplifying a bit, marginalized voices – racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays, etc. – are overrepresented among liberals and as such, the left that has been forced to grapple with the issues and concerns of marginalized communities in such a way as to make liberalism better equipped to deal with these issues.

It seems that insofar that libertarians experience oppression or constraints on their liberty, it is through the actions of the state rather than through culture, which makes sense. Libertarians are overwhelmingly white and male, and in a culture which highly values whiteness and maleness, they will face relatively fewer overt cultural constraints on their behavior than their more marginalized fellow-travelers.  Or in other words, a fair number of libertarians are operating with a good deal of unexamined privilege, and it’s this, along with the extremely small number of women and minorities who operate within the libertarian framework, which makes grappling with cultural sources of oppression really hard for libertarians.  After all – socially speaking – being a white guy in the United States isn’t exactly hard and that’s doubly true if you are well off.

*Has it already come out?

After reading several accounts of the Ephemerisle Festival (for those interested, a more in-depth explanation of the event – and seasteading – can be found here), I’m more convinced than ever that I really need to attend one of these events. As I’ve said earlier, however, I don’t expect any floating cities to launch in my lifetime, and reports from Ephemerisle haven’t done much to change this assessment (The Irish Times‘ take on the conspicuous absence of nautical know-how isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring).

That said, the movement’s impressive groundwork suggests that enthusiasm for seasteading is more than a fad, and the idea of floating communities has, at the very least, provoked some incredibly interesting discussion. But I wonder if all of this enthusiasm is misplaced. My lack of engineering knowledge notwithstanding, the technical barriers to creating sustainable floating cities seem enormous. The political complications arising from seaborne secession also strike me as an important (and under-appreciated) hurdle to seasteading; if floating communities become as subversive as their boosters suggest, I think the likelihood of some two-bit dictator’s navy nipping the project in the bud increases dramatically.

The logic of seasteading, however, remains compelling. Creating a mechanism for persistent, non-theoretical political experimentation strikes me as a very worthy goal. So why not channel all of this energy into reclaiming the states as laboratories of democracy (or libertarianism)? The political barriers to a federalist revival are also immense, but they seem downright trivial compared to the challenges facing prospective seasteaders. I can’t help thinking that it would be easier for libertarians to claim Vermont as their own than to recreate Galt’s Gulch on an abandoned oil platform.

One possible objection is that experimenting within an American political context constrains the scope of potential experiments.* To be perfectly honest, I think this is a feature, not a bug. Whether through dumb luck or wise statesmanship, the West seems to have narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political systems down to variants of democratic capitalism. All that’s left, then, is to further refine the formula through more experimentation. A return to federalism strikes me as the best (and most feasible) way to accomplish this goal.

*One other possible objection is that libertarians have already tried – and failed – to jump-start a federalist revival.