Sigh…
March 27, 2009 5 Comments
Killing Frankenstein’s Monster
And yet to many, the differences on policy prescriptions between libertarianism and liberalism seem even larger than the differences on policy prescriptions between conservatism and libertarianism. Why? The answer is, I think, quite simply the messy problem of coalition politics in a two-party system. In such a system, the various ideologies that make up each coalition will inevitably cross-pollinate as they unite behind a handful of core issues on which the constituent ideologies have a unity of interest. But, as I’ve argued time and again over the last year and a half, eventually those core issues fade to the background and one or more of the constituent groups gradually leaves the coalition and maybe even joins the other coalition, starting the cycle anew.
I argued earlier that the current political alignment has corrupted libertarianism in a way that has caused it to forget too much of its classically liberal roots (this is true even though it has also helped give libertarians influence in excess of our numbers, that being the Catch-22 of coalition politics), and that libertarianism at this point needs to find a way to sever its ties with conservatism.
But it’s also important to recognize the way that libertarianism has corrupted conservatism to a fairly large extent, resulting in a “movement conservatism” that is ideologically incoherent. “Conservatism,” at least as it was historically defined, represented a political philosophy that existed to put the brakes on social and economic upheaval. It was not an ideology that was per se opposed to any kind of cultural change; but it was an ideology that insisted upon respect for long-established cultural, societal, and political traditions, and upon stability as a moral imperative. Obviously, these are not values that are at the core of a libertarianism built around the maximization of individual freedom.
And yet, libertarians and conservatives for a very long while – even before there was a term for “libertarian” – made natural coalition partners against a New Deal coalition that must have seemed hell-bent on imposing fairly radical changes that were also anathema to core libertarian principles on economic freedom. And with the subsequent looming threat of international Communism, a valid raison d’etre for the alliance remained. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall? Not much. And yet the coalition largely remained in tact, perhaps mostly because of the way that cross-pollination had obscured the fundamental philosophical differences between libertarians and the dominant varieties of conservatism.
So why should libertarians remain in the fold if there is no longer much cause to ally themselves with conservatives? Ross Douthat and Jonah Goldberg have suggested that leaving would deprive the coalition of the Right of its most intellectual component, making it more explicitly anti-intellectual, nationalist, and nativist, while failing to exert much influence on the coalition of the Right.
February 19, 2009 25 Comments
