Notes Away from a Definition of “Liberaltarianism”: Prologue
The “notes away from a definition” trick is a steal from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who suggested it as the title of a Samuel R Delany essay. His point is that definitions draw the eye perversely toward edge cases, bright shiny anomalies that distract from the essential commonality that is the real subject of interest. (Delany went with another title.) As I try to systematize what I think it means to be a libertarian who has come to identify more with Democrats than Republicans, to the extent that I identify with either major party at all, there will be edge cases aplenty to beware.
Before we get to any of that, though, a cautionary tale or two. Julian Sanchez has an excellent piece on how Nanny States tend to grow naturally out of welfare states. This is, I think, where libertarians making our peace with the American Left can say only, “No further.” If universal government health insurance coverage means granting a the government a license to regulate otherwise “self-regarding” activities, then we must oppose universal government health insurance coverage.
Jon Henke and Thomas Knapp, meanwhile, write about the American impulse to form third parties. Henke suggests that the only success third-party movements ever have comes when disaffected voters coalesce around charismatic personalities. This seems largely true. It hasn’t historically worked to the benefit of libertarian goals, probably because you get a subtextual authoritarianism free with your impulse to rally around a charismatic figure. Henke thinks the current politician most likely to succeed as the insect of an afternoon’s third force is John McCain. He’s surely right about this, and McCain is one of the least libertarian politicians going.
Knapp writes about how unlikely it is that any major-party politician will sign up for such a movement:
A McCain-Feingold Unity08 ticket (for example) might win the 2008 presidential election … but if not, we wouldn’t see McCain and Feingold’s parties welcoming them back.
As a thought experiment, imagine Ralph Nader trying to get a Democratic-Party Senate nomination today, and he wasn’t even a “traitor.” It’s not like Ralph Nader was a longstanding office-holder or party official. But both grass-roots and organization Democrats hate his guts now.
Scattered thoughts, but it says “Prologue” right in the title.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
May 30, 2006 @ 10:48 pm
it means to be a libertarian who has come to identify more with Democrats than Republicans
It means the ladies cold love the new, fit Henley form.
Comment by Nell —
May 30, 2006 @ 10:55 pm
A McCain-Feingold Unity08 ticket
Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that ticket, Knappster. The Falwell commencement speech is a Rubicon, a welcome eye-opener for deluded ”third way”-ists.
Comment by Gary Farber —
May 30, 2006 @ 11:47 pm
”John Henke”
Jon Henke. Why is it so many people confuse ”Jon” and ”John” so constantly? I see this one every day. ”John Stewart” apparently does a popular tv program, but isn’t a Green Lantern.
”If universal government health insurance coverage means granting a the government a license to regulate otherwise ’self-regarding’ activities, then we must oppose”
I’m for the former, or at least the results of it — I really couldn’t care less how we get everyone medical care, so long as everyone gets it easily — but I’m quite opposed to the second. I’m not the only one.
”Henke suggests that the only success third-party movements ever have comes when disaffected voters coalesce around charismatic personalities.”
Or opposing slavery.
Comment by Jon Henke —
May 31, 2006 @ 7:23 am
Thanks for the link, Jim. I’ve been meaning to blogroll you for the longest time, but it always slips my mind at the crucial (and rare) moment when I actually sign in to blogrolling.com. If my memory improves in the near future, I’ll rectify that. I enjoy your work a great deal, and I suspect we have more common ground than our sometime-differences might suggest.
In re: ”McCain is one of the least libertarian politicians going.”
—-Perhaps. I think he’s more libertarian than, for example, Bush, but that’s an awfully low bar. My impression is that McCain has a Great Man complex. That is, he has some laudable tendencies, but he’s often willing to abandon them when he thinks he has a Good Idea. And why not? He’s a Great Man, and Great Men can get things done.
That would explain, e.g., the way he throws the 1st ammendment under the train when he gets sufficiently irked about a ”problem” (campaign finance, clean government, etc) or why he frequently goes maverick on various issues with no apparent ideological principle in mind.
I fear McCain, not because he’s got a worse voting record than many other candidates, but because I fear politicians who believe their Grand Ideas render a healthy skepticism irrelevant.
Comment by Barry —
May 31, 2006 @ 8:51 am
Jon, or because McCain wants power, and is willing to give up his principles for it. That’s why he supported Bush in ’04; that’s why he’s sucking up to the religious wrong today.
Nell: ”Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that ticket, Knappster. The Falwell commencement speech is a Rubicon, a welcome eye-opener for deluded â€third wayâ€-ists. ”
Nah, he’ll have that rep forever. The mainstream media has settled on the story that he’s an independent maverick, and honest. Look how much mileage Bush got out of his story.
Comment by Leonard —
May 31, 2006 @ 9:00 am
Regarding the whole ”great man” theory of awful governance, there’s something here wrt the Democrats. Like Jon, I fear the ones who believe in themselves. I made a comment to that effect recently here regarding Bush on Iran – he seems to believe that he’s been chosen by God Himself to Stop Terrorism. There’s a great danger there, at least from the outside perspective of someone who does not believe that God talks to the President in any way.
The danger of the Republican Great Men is that the Republican base believe much the same thing as they do, and have a will to believe even worse. Thus, Bush’s problem with the hardcore base of the Fighting Keyboardists is not that he started an unnecessary war. It’s that he isn’t expanding it fast enough; that he somehow let it get bogged down. After all, if you’re on a mission from God, shouldn’t you press?
The left/liberal Great Men (and Woman), by contrast, cannot lead the people so far astray, because the people will never believe that God’s plan is something that does not particularly concord with our instinctive tribal biases. (For ”God’s plan”, feel free to sub ”the will of the People” or ”the Inevitable Tide of History”.) It is instictively obvious that we need to crush other tribes, drive them before us, and hear the lamentations of their women. It is instictively obvious that those lower on the heirarchy must abase themselves to those above. Read the Bible – it’s all there (along with that hippy-dippy stuff from 30 AD, but that stuff is personal, not political). It is these sorts of passions that the right wing channel as their big ideas.
By contrast, when some left leader comes up with some radical new big government idea, it will not concorde with the instincts of most of the population. (Egalitarianism does have tribal appeal, but it’s always hard to sell big government as equality.) So the leader will have a far harder time fooling himself into believing he’s chosen by God (or the People, same thing), and the base won’t fool themselves on this point, either.
All of that is re: America. Certainly, in societies that are far more heirarchical than ours is, the left’s egalitarianism is a natural tribal hook to hang leveling policies on. Think Chavez here, or many other leftish leaders in Latin America. This sort of thing can’t happen in America exactly because the historic success of the left in stamping out practically all legal discrimination, and most social discrimination as well.
Comment by lemuel pitkin —
May 31, 2006 @ 9:01 am
If universal government health insurance coverage means granting the government a license to regulate otherwise “self-regarding†activities, then we must oppose universal government health insurance.
Now there’s an intriguing sentemce, what with the pregnant ”if” and the suggestive ”self-regarding”. Looking forward to seeing it unpacked…
Comment by Leonard —
May 31, 2006 @ 9:13 am
Regarding the main topic here… what it means to be a libertarian who has come to identify more with Democrats than Republicans, to the extent that I identify with either major party at all… maybe you really do need a definition here. Big people can handle the attraction of shiny edge cases and still talk about the main thing. Aren’t we all grownups here?
Perhaps it would help to answer a few questions here.
First, is this really new? Or have you always felt more comfortable with Ds than Rs?
Second, is it not just an artifact of the political situation? Once Ds retake enough of the government, won’t you revert? So is ”liberaltarianism” (ugh) not just way of meaning libertarian oppositionism?
Third, assuming you think it is something more than libertarian oppositionism…. what positive program do you see in ”liberaltarianism”? Are you seriously thinking any real D politician will propound, much less do, anything substantial that increases liberty? If so… what?
Fourth, is this a way of talking about political realignment? Clearly libertarians are more in the political wilderness now than they’ve ever been. (The logic of the system grinds ever finer.) Do you think there’s some chance that the Ds will change to be libertarian-friendly, even if only as lip service? That is, as friendly as the Rs used to be?
Comment by Grant —
May 31, 2006 @ 9:14 am
The best use for a third party would not be for that third party to be libertarian — as you note, third parties start as cults of personality which are, if not outright authoritarian, at least seriously populist.
The best bet for a third party would be for it to be so over-the-top populist and to drain so many of the instinctively authoritarian voters from the other parties that one of those parties has to try a libertarian shift to compensate.
If Perot had been epsilon less crazy, the Republicans or the Democrats would have had to fight the next election from a more libertarian position just to put space between themselves in comparison to him.
This seems to me the real hope that mobs like Unity08 present: The way to appeal to the Glorious Center of the Median Voter is with shallow populism and personality; with some of those ”swing voters” out of play, the Republicans and Democrats might discover that there are other voters who are just as marginal, but on the margins of different policy directions. There, not in the populist third way but in the reaction to it, is where a real ”liberaltarianism” (or alternatively a rebirth of fusionism) might actually find energy and purpose.
Comment by jlw —
May 31, 2006 @ 9:59 am
Like Leonard, I’d like to see what ”Liberaltarianism” would mean, though unlike him, I’m standing on the other side. What ”core liberal beliefs” would liberals have to let go of–real core beliefs, not straw ones (for instance, I am not interested in prying that twinkie from your cold, dead hands). Does the bargain entail giving up on helping children from the margins of society have access to a quality education? Does it mean abandoning the idea of protecting the global environment and the many local ecosystems from pollution and degradation? Does it mean overriding locally initiated public health measures such as work place smoking bans?
I’ve expressed in these pages the belief that liberals and libertarians can work together. I am especially interested in paring the power of the federal government down to just a few basic areas (though admittedly, those areas–funding social and health insurance, a modest national defence, some basic science research, enforcement of Constitutionally granted civil rights, and maybe some other things I’ve forgotten–don’t count as ”small” government if your only metric is raw expenditures). I think most self-identified liberals are not wedded to the idea of always expanding government, and like me they can be persuaded to toss out the alphabet soup of agencies in Washington if it means focusing the power of government into a few areas where it can do both the most good and the least harm.
So that the ”liberal” half. What’s the ”tarian” half?
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
May 31, 2006 @ 10:25 am
I’ve been over this before in Email, but the problem of liberaltarianism is one of power imbalance, right? Liberals don’t believe in the ideological apparatus of libertarianism. Therefore, the only reason why liberals should listen to libertarians is because libertarians bring political power to a coalition. But there’s no political power there to bring that is specifically libertarian rather than U.S.-region-cultural. (People in the West may be more likely to vote Democratic if Democrats drop an anti-gun identification — but not because people in the West hold libertarian views about it.)
For libertarians looking to leverage whatever power they do have in the Democratic party, I advocate the following:
1. Libertarians served the Republican party, and gained some small influence thereby, by serving as the false face of economic freedom over corporatism. They can do the same for Democrats by serving as the false face of social freedom over humanism.
2. The growing polarization of politics helps libertarian goals. If the War on Drugs becomes identified as a particularly Republican agenda, as it should be, then there’s a greater chance of it being dumped by a Democratic party in power that’s grown more confrontational due to their time in opposition.
3. Liberals are generally pragmatic, and care whether or not governmental policies work. Libertarians can point out economic cases in which regulation would be counterproductive with some expectation of being heard, if they can make a good case.
Comment by Jesse Walker —
May 31, 2006 @ 11:55 am
Jim: I can see why you would identify more with the left than the right. But why with the Dems? Is there any major Democratic politician whose agenda impresses you?
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 31, 2006 @ 12:42 pm
Jesse: Good catch. Rich: I did get the instructions, yes. Just didn’t consider them the last word on the subject.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
May 31, 2006 @ 2:00 pm
Didn’t mean to imply that you didn’t get them; it was more a warning that I was going to re-hash stuff already hashed.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
May 31, 2006 @ 10:39 pm
Jim, I do hope this is not a prologue to your announcing support for one or another ”strategic” alliance. I cannot comprehend how any libertarian could soberly consider, in toto, the political history of the last fifty or so years, and come out believing that ”identifying” with either major party could possibly gain us anything. Rich, though he has in this thread managed the nontrivial feat of being even more smug and arrogant than usual, has a point: we will only ever be useful to either party as a false front or a rearranger of deck chairs.
.
You have, these last few years, performed with sterling vigor (much more vigor than I will ever have) the most important of libertarian tasks: you have made the case for disillusionment with, and contempt of, those presently in power. This is most important because it is eternally just– those in power will always richly deserve disillusion and contempt– and because the long-term ability of civil society to hold the state in check depends on the proportion of people who laugh at the politicians’ lies and spit on their grand schemes. As long as you continue this task you will be the best sort of libertarian no matter what you label yourself. Please, whatever you do, don’t abandon it.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
June 1, 2006 @ 9:24 am
Nicholas: ”This is most important because it is eternally just– those in power will always richly deserve disillusion and contempt”
There’s no particular reason to listen to anyone who is eternally contemptuous of those in power, no matter what their policies. Presumably there could in theory be some gradation of degrees of contempt, but mostly this leads back to the simple equivalence of all politicians that has served so well in distinguishing Clinton’s Whitewater from Bush II’s torture policies, say, or Democrats from Republicans in general.
As for smugness and arrogance, call it whatever you want. But libertaria has done Democrats no favors, and doesn’t seem to offer much. Most of libertaria will never even detach itself from the Republicans, in my opinion, unless they are forced to through Republican authoritarianism that can’t be ignored. (Really, I’d say that even Jim seems to be in this situation, although he did notice it far earlier than most.) If the only reason that someone is voting for you is because they have nowhere else to go, why make concessions to them that hurt your agenda?
Comment by Thomas L. Knapp —
June 1, 2006 @ 11:17 am
Jim,
Hmmm … you write: ”McCain is one of the least libertarian politicians going.”
This is not typically something I’d argue, but in the context of your musings (i.e. identification more with Democrats than with Republicans), it’s worthing looking at.
The Republican Liberty Caucus has maintained a ”Liberty Index” on US Senators and Representatives since 1991.
For four of those 15 years (1998, 1999, 2004 and 2005), the RLC rated McCain as a ”Libertarian.” For eight other years, the RLC rated McCain as an ”Enterpriser,” which is their next level ”below” ”Libertarian.” They rated him a ”Centrist” in 1992, and a ”Conservative” in 2002 and 2003. His ”lifetime rating” is in the ”Enterpriser” class at 70.4 (”Libertarian” is 75 and above on a scale of 100).
If you’re thinking that this says a lot more about the RLC than it does about McCain, I agree: Trent Lott (!) came in at #2 on their 2005 ”Liberty Index” with a rating of 92.x%, and Rick Santorum (!!!) showed up on the list, tied with three others right behind Ron Paul, in 2004.
Comment by Hesiod —
June 1, 2006 @ 11:46 pm
Third parties used to be easier to develop back when the political partis actually had major ideological differences.
You think the Democrats and Republicans are ”far apart” right now? That’s nothing compared to the Federalists and Anti-Federalists. Or the Democrats and the Whigs.
The reason third parties no longer succeed is because they either coalesce around a single issue or set of issues, and/or a personality.
Any third party based on an issue or specific set of issues can be defused if one of the other mainstream parties co-opts the issue. And that is what happened in 1992 when Bill Clinton, albeit reluctantly, co-opted ”balancing the budget” as a Democratic plank, thus defusing Ross Perot’s nascent third party movement.
Right now, there is a HUGE opening for an antiwar/return to normalcy party to do some damage. The Republicans have the Iraq war anchor around tehir necks, and the Democrats seem hell bent on trying to pull it off.
Whichever party [probably the Democrats] goes anti-war first will reap the benefits.
Expect all the major party bigshot candiates to give ”Road to Damascus” speeches on Iraq within the next twelve months in order to ”explain” why they no lnger think we should be in Iraq.
This will be MUCH easier for Hillary Clinton to do, since the rank and file of her party is already in the ”get the hell out of Iraq ASAP” camp.
John McCain will have some trouble with the GOP base. And Rudy Giuliani can’t do it because ”tough leadership[” is the ONLY selling point he has to the Republican party primary voters.
Look for a leser GOP candidate, maybe a Senator George Allen. Or a Sam Brownback, who has bona fide conservative credentials to make the anti-war break with Bush.
Chuck Hagel would be a natural coice, but he was a war skeptic beforte being a war skeptic was cool. Normally, being prescient and right about a major issue like that would demonstrate to voters that yu have good judgment.
But, Republicans hate good judgment. It makes them nervous. Good juddgment is an ”enlightenment” value. It’s humanism writ large. And they can’t have that.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
June 2, 2006 @ 6:51 am
And that is what happened in 1992 when Bill Clinton, albeit reluctantly, co-opted â€balancing the budget†as a Democratic plank, thus defusing Ross Perot’s nascent third party movement.
The Agenda suggests that Greenspan and Rubin convinced Clinton to pay down the debt, as GHWB’s advisors convinced him of the need to do the same. (I may be misremembering this.)
Comment by Eric —
June 2, 2006 @ 11:08 am
Well, certain types of libertarian may be able to find liberal allies. For example, there’s a very large number of liberals who are (a) staunch civil libertarians (increasingly including the second ammendment) and (b) believers in a western-style ”mixed economy” that includes a strong capitalist market with a safety net. For libertarians who prioritize basic civil liberties over a complete absense of taxes and business regulation, this might be an acceptable alliance, if not a comfortable one.
A few dubious types of libertarians, however, are definitely unwelcome:
1) ”Libertarians” who will throw the Bill of Rights under the bus in the name of tax cuts (or anything else) are dangerous scum. Any viable liberal/libertarian alliance has to put the Bill of Rights front and center.
2) Libertarians who wish to bring freedom and capitalism to other countries by unilateral, pre-emptive force of arms (which seems to be Eric Raymond’s position) are seriously deluded. I’m willing to put my life on the line to stop genocide, perhaps, but not to overthrow every sucky government in the world.
3) Libertarians who believe in making radical, irreversible and untested changes to society (as opposed to a gradual repeal of bad laws and construction of new institutions) will probably never come to terms with liberal gadualism and pragmatism. Many us of are suspicious of Great Leaps Forward (regardless of ideology), because we suspect we don’t fully understand how society works.
I’ve been thinking a lot about libertarian/liberal synthesis lately, especially after reading Why2K’s discussion of Utopian vs Piecemeal Social Engineering. It caused me to seriously rethink my objections to libertarianism, and conclude that only two libertarian groups cause problems for me: (a) the bizarre Bushite ”libertarians”, who appear to really be dope-smoking irreligious authoritarians, and (b) the radical utopians who want to change everything all at once. Everybody else I can probably compromise with.
Comment by Hesiod —
June 2, 2006 @ 11:43 am
The Agenda suggests that Greenspan and Rubin convinced Clinton to pay down the debt, as GHWB’s advisors convinced him of the need to do the same. (I may be misremembering this.)
Actually, it was the opposite. Bentsen, Rubin and Greenspan pushed Clinton to FOCUS on balanciung the budget. Clinton angrily, and famously, remarked that he felt more like a ”fucking Eisenhower Republican.”
Comment by Hesiod —
June 2, 2006 @ 11:55 am
Well, certain types of libertarian may be able to find liberal allies. For example, there’s a very large number of liberals who are (a) staunch civil libertarians (increasingly including the second ammendment)
This is true for a number of reasons.
Democrats adopted the gun control agenda in the 80’s and early 90’s not for ideological reasons but to counterbalance the GOP’s effective ”tough on crime” wedge issue that pitted Democrtic civil libertarians vs. muderers and rapists in the eyes of a crime-fearing public.
As a countermeasure, the Democrats latched onto the mile-wide, inch-deep support amonmg the public (particularly urban minorities and suburban women) to gun control to show they wre ”tough on crime” without also having to compromise on the 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th amendments.
Another key constitency for gun control that the Democrats targetted were Police Unions. And, Bill Clinton successfully manage dto negate the ”qweak on crime” attacks by the Republicans by getting substantial police support.
However, this stance backfired on the Democrats with rank and file ”Reagan Democrats, who were also sportsmen. Which, wouldn’t be quite so bad if the Police Unions hadn’t started dissing Democrats for other reasons.
So, the Dems got no real political value out of advocating gun control beyond possibly the 1992 election. Thus, it was ripe for abandonment by the party.
In fract, the slience of Gun conrtol as a pro-Democratic issue ironically went way down as the crime rates plunged in the 90’s and earlier this decade. So even urban minorities didn’t rate it as a majoor voting issue anymore.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
June 2, 2006 @ 9:32 pm
From my point of view, at least, the questions ”What should libertarians do in the present crisis?” and ”What would be good for libertarians to do if we had more or less normal politics at this time?” are quite different. I have a feeling that libertarians interested in accomplishing anything on the federal level can expect a lot of moving around for triage, and also to face the question Rich Pulchasky raises, ”What’s the benefit for the other side?”
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
June 3, 2006 @ 12:45 am
I think the structural question facing anyone who feels not well represented (caution, may contain understatement) by existing politics is, are you in fact someone worth reaching out to? After all, not everyone else.
Many of us know the phenomenon of the person who might conceivably be a customer of business X, except that either they cannott actually be satisfied (something will always, always justify their turning away) or the cost of winning them over is so high that the effort put into it would really be better spent dealing with 2, or 5, or 10 customers prepared to be satisfied more easily. A lot of libertarians are like that: a party that could satisfy them as not too horribly tainted is not one that can win anything. But it’s a matter of personality, not ideology, and is found equally among socialists, Greens, dominion theology fans, you name it. The point is that not every desire to find a reasonably suitable party is one that can be satisfied, not if I the seeker am simply unwilling to settle for much less than the ideal.
Now it’s also true that parties do a terrible job of deciding when enough is enough. A saner Republican Party would not have gone so far courting the theocratic crowd; a saner Democratic Party would not have accommodated either some of the ’70s splinter activist groups or the DLC so far. So it’s quite possible that being unreasonable in the right way, in the right circumstances could get one far. It’s just not usually a bet I personally want to make.
Comment by Nell —
June 3, 2006 @ 1:07 pm
a saner Democratic Party would not have accommodated either some of the ’70s splinter activist groups
Bruce, you make a lot of sense in these comments. Could you give some examples of the accommodation you refer to above?
Comment by Nell —
June 3, 2006 @ 1:15 pm
Hesiod: So, the Dems got no real political value out of advocating gun control beyond possibly the 1992 election. Thus, it was ripe for abandonment by the party.
Astute. In fact, it was abandoned much earlier than that by some pols who are now Dem leaders.
One of my most vivid campaign memories is of a constituent coming up to a Harkin staffer at an eastern Iowa parade in the fall of 1984, when then-Rep. Harkin was first running for Senate, and complaining about the letter he’d gotten from Harkin’s office on gun issues. Turned out a DC staffer had churned out an answer that was not Harkin’s position (and I believe was canned as a result). The staffer had absorbed Beltway CW on what a liberal’s gun views should be, and never bothered to check whether that was his boss’s actual position.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 3, 2006 @ 1:49 pm
The Clinton-Gore White House embraced/fostered the Million Mom March crowd, thinking that gun control was an electoral winner with suburban moms. Turned out it lost Gore more votes than it won, and maybe a decisive margin. The nice thing, from a libertarian perspective, is that gun control seems to have dropped right off the Democratic Party policy menu since about that time. So that’s one big dealbreaker down.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
June 3, 2006 @ 3:21 pm
Nell, I’ll have to do some research to make sure I’m not running just on old memories. If I can get some time when family crises aren’t eating my brains, I’ll do that. If I can’t make a good case for that particular point, I’ll stick with the DLC’s ascendancy in more recent elections, which strikes me as a clear case of folly in Barbara Tuchman’s sense (policy contrary to self-interest, through more than one administration, with alternatives known to be available at the time), along with the Republican courting of theocrats.
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June 6, 2006 @ 10:54 am
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