Inconceivable
A Saturday Twitter exchange highlights a couple of weaknesses I think libertarians have in coping with the politics of non-libertarians, particularly conservatives.
Part the First
Part the Second
Taking the original tweet literally, the author has a gap in his understanding (”I don’t get”) about why Republicans have Republican opinions. Taking it a bit more figuratively, the author disapproves of their – defective? ignorant? partial? understanding or implementation of the Tenth Amendment Tea-Party Republicans revere, at least rhetorically.
The second tweet suggests we’re dealing with a schematic weakness. There are two types of people in the world, “statists” and, presumably, anti-statists. More, statists must be motivated by a meaningful imperative called “statism,” because the statist/anti-statist dichotomy animates the libertarian, so it must animate the non-libertarian too. (More, a non-libertarian who suggests others don’t view the Tenth Amendment the way you do must be “bashing” the Tenth Amendment – in the name, naturally, of a strong central government). I am speaking from memory here. This is weird even on its own terms. Because libertarians are hyper-aware that “libertarianism” itself comes in an extraordinary variety of only semi-compatible flavors: Objectivists; “dynamists”; right-libertarians; left-libertarians; paleo-libertarians; neo-libertarians; meso-libertarians; anarcho-capitalists; minarchists; constitutionalists and so on. But people exquisitely sensitive to those distinctions are then prone to blur every political program and philosophy of government from Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture to the Earned Income Tax Credit into an essentially unitary “statism.” But if you can distinguish Rad Geek from Lew Rockwell, you really ought to be able to tell Lenin from Barak Obama.
Truly, most libertarians do make these distinctions, at least in practice, most of the time. But there are days . . .
The other potential problem here is a certain naivete. That, let me stress, I used to have! Libertarians hear right-wingers using terms like “limited government” and “federalism” and praising “constitutionalism” and the Tenth Amendment. They see right-wingers supporting policies – promiscuous war; the surveillance state; draconian sexual regulation; racially and religiously tinged exclusions – at odds with “limited government” and “federalism” and “constitutionalism” as libertarians use those terms. They then make one of two errors.
The generous error is to assume that the right-winger’s understanding of “limited government [etc.]” is incomplete. The right-winger really wants “limited government” – he says so! He just needs libertarians to develop his understanding of what the term really means. If he supports “federalism” and the Federal Marriage Amendment that would deprive individual states of their historical prerogative of defining the terms of marriage within their borders, the solution is to help him realize that the FMA is contrary to the spirit of the federalism he reveres. If he supports limited government and militarized drug prohibition, what is required is an explanation of how militarized drug prohibition is “unlimited government” by definition. (An easy task, because it is!)
The ungenerous error is to assume that the right-winger’s deployment of favored libertarian terminology is hypocritical. The right-winger knows perfectly well that combining the state secrets doctrine with a global torture apparatus counts, in no sense, as “limited government.” Nor does preempting state-level fuel-economy regulation count as “federalism.” Unlike in the previous case, the libertarian assumes bad faith on the right-winger’s part. But the “solution” is essentially the same: demonstrate the incompatibility of the preferred policy with the announced principle. Thus one might spend literally years explaining all the ways that militarism is incompatible with “limited government,” resulting in, among other things, the bulk of this blog’s archives.
In general, libertarians make the second error with political elites – officials; mouthpieces – and the first with political masses (”the base”). Both the above errors, though, are errors, and stem from the same misconception: that valorized libertarian terms have a true meaning which is the libertarian meaning which is trumps. That they embody a principle which supercedes mere policy preference and politics. When the guy down at the bar says he wants “limited government” and a national ID to prevent illegals from taking our jobs, he means he wants limited government but hasn’t yet grasped that this means he doesn’t really want a national ID. When the Virginia Congressman says he believes in “federalism” but votes to prevent states from allowing medical insurers to cover abortion expenses, he’s playing a trick we can reveal, and the exposed hypocrisy will lead to better behavior – he’ll either drop his anti-federalist initiative or at least stop sullying the term federalism with his weak-sauce lip service.
If nothing else, the libertarian hopes to at least coax an admission of inconsistency out of the target. “I believe in limited government, except that I want us to be in all kinds of wars all over the world.” “I believe in property rights, except that I’m making it my business whether some dude who owns a building in Manhattan can do Muslim stuff in it.” Even that much movement honors the true (libertarian) definitions of limited government and constitutionalism and property rights.
None of this is going to happen, though. The Tea-Partier doesn’t want “limited government” and restrictivist immigration policies and corporatist subsidies and fertility-control regimes that are incompatible with his limited-government principles. The Subcommittee Superstar doesn’t want “federalism” and a distinctly un-federalist prerogative to hector New-York City officials over just what sort of development they should permit in a three-block area around where something awful happened a decade ago. Instead, “limited government” is simply the umbrella term for all the things the Tea Partier wants politically. “Federalism” is the principle by which the Subcommittee Superstar can hassle Manhattan Muslims while “Washington bureaucrats” leave car-dealers from the Superstar’s home state in peace. “Property rights” mean, for the Enterpriser, “I can wash my nitrates into the estuary. You can not open a gay bar.” This isn’t a matter of misunderstanding or hypocrisy. It’s just labeling.
Comment by Gsnorgathon —
September 24, 2011 @ 3:19 pm
Everyone wants limited government. They want to limit government to doing things they approve of.
Comment by Thoreau —
September 24, 2011 @ 4:13 pm
Good post, Jim. I had some similar thoughts up a few years ago:
Strangely enough, I was actually thinking about some of those ideas this morning, tossing around some analogies between the libertarian critique and the behavior of cow-orkers in large organizations.
Comment by matthew h —
September 24, 2011 @ 4:14 pm
Political passion comes from visions in the gut not (primarily) from ideas, logic and principles. Most of us libertarians, idiot savant autistics the lot, who are generally more correct on the principles than others (sorry Jim, the principles are still good despite your metamorphosis), still don’t get that because most do not understand people qua people, like good Aspergery folks they are, (hence the unseemly high attraction to miscreants like Ms Rand), despite the fact that they factor human incentives more correctly than other political groups into their calculations of program, policy and principle.
Hence many libertarians actually think — as you did for many years — that principles are core motivators and winning minds was central to winning hearts. No, it’s about providing more disposable income in the short term with rousing music, a tough call for Rain Men.
This does not discredit either the idea or the people, it just shows that humans are such that it took 200 years to go from Copernicus to his acceptance and about 2000 from the invention of the steam engine in ancient Greeece to the invention of the steam engine in Scotland, or the discovery in 1492 that the world was VERY round even though calculated accurately to its circumference in about 100 BC or so.
Nerdy ideas that conflict with cherished myths and political power do not carry on articulation alone or especially, they require patience in very very slow increments until someone wakes up after a few dead generations and says holy shit, that freedom thing the dead twitchy nerdy guy talked about, can work and reaistically too! In the long run, they were indeed all dead, but we’re alive now and hey it just may work.
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September 24, 2011 @ 4:42 pm
[...] of the problem, or you hold yourself to some standard that exists independently of the system. Matthew h just made an excellent point about how libertarians often have the clearest perception and…, but they often incorrectly assume (as Jim also argued) that people are motivated by principles or [...]
Comment by TGGP —
September 24, 2011 @ 7:01 pm
Patri Friedman recommends giving up on “winning hearts and minds”, and providing more disposable income instead.
Comment by Gene Callahan —
September 25, 2011 @ 6:09 am
matthew h does a nice job illustrating how blind libertarians are (as I was!) to their own chief shortcoming. They are (they believe) in possession of the correct principles, and it will just take others hundreds of years to catch up! It never occurs to them that principles simply aren’t the kind of things they think they are, that principles in politics are rules of thumb, and not axioms from which one can deduce concrete policies.
Comment by Gene Callahan —
September 25, 2011 @ 6:13 am
“the discovery in 1492 that the world was VERY round”
Oh, and btw, no educated European in 1492 doubted that the world was round. No one at Ferdinand and Isabella’s court was worried that Columbus would sail off the edge. The idea that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat was simply made up in the 19th-century as another way to smear the hated Middle Ages.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 25, 2011 @ 9:52 am
Gene, I confess to being influenced by your recent writings here, even though you’ve supposedly taken a “conservative turn” while I’ve veered leftward. Go figure!
I’m still not sure, but maybe what libertarians think of as principles really are what principles are to libertarians. I say, “not sure,” because my alternate theory is that libertarians are like tiddlywink, er, winks. Libertarianism is what we profess until life’s equivalent of the squidger – the pressure of events and circumstance – forces us to pop one way or the other. After which we land in one of the same cups to which “liberal” and “conservative” pieces have flown.
Comment by Julian Sanchez —
September 25, 2011 @ 10:46 am
Mmm, I actually think this is wrong. The words “limited” and “government” have both independent meaning as ordinary English words, and a traditional meaning as a phrase in American political discourse. Ditto “federalism.”
When you point out to conservatives the tension between those meanings and currently fashionable GOP policy views, they don’t just stare at you as though you’ve obtusely failed to realize that “gay” in 2011 has a totally different meaning than it did in 1911. They do not act as though this is a semantic quibble. Rather, they either try to explain why they think certain exceptions to a generally valid principle are justifiable, or in some cases attempt to argue that some apparent deviations from “small government” are actually necessary to preserving the larger structure of limited government (i.e. “we must limit immigration or the welfare state will balloon out of control” or “unless we have strong religious institutions, government will naturally fill the void” or “without DOMA, a few states would force their policy on the rest via the Full Faith & Credit Clause, also undermining federalism”).
Now, to be sure, modern conservatives are typically pretty happy to ignore those contradictions until they’re pointed out, and blank them out again as quickly as possible afterwards. But you CAN point them out, and the conservative will understand perfectly well what you mean, and that the conflict stands in need of some explanation or resolution—as would not be the case if the problem were merely the failure of libertarians to recognize a new linguistic convention.
Comment by Frank Shannon —
September 25, 2011 @ 12:33 pm
It seems to me like Jim is very carefully avoiding calling republicans idiots.
Julian seems to me to be essentially crossing that line here.
Pingback by Libertarian Words, Conservative Mouths § Unqualified Offerings —
September 25, 2011 @ 1:17 pm
[...] comments downblog, Julian objects to my thesis on the grounds that it’s wrong. A telling objection if true! So let me give a completely [...]
Comment by matthew h —
September 25, 2011 @ 7:19 pm
Gene — My point, clumsily worded, was indeed that everyone knew the world was round, the “VERY” I alluded to was the discovery that it was bigger than presumed, at least by columbus. But the knowledge was lost of the full size; I believe Eratostosthenes or one of them Greeks with sticks and shadows got it right. You are correct that the idea that everyone thought the world was flat was a later slander on the Middle Ages.
I have no problem believing that people can take centuries to reach better truths as I illustrated with examples nor axioms. The libertarianism you described sounds “Austrian” where they do tend to believe that certain economic facts are a priori principles and axioms, personally I dont, I think they are solid rules of thumb for human affairs, and can be used to deduce policies that are moral and workable.
Policies ARE rules of thumb, not mathematical axioms.
Comment by ian —
September 26, 2011 @ 7:28 am
The tea-party notion of “limited government” amounts to government limited to what they want government to do. Not really my idea of what limited government should be or do. By their standard, the Nazis represent the epitome of limited government.
Comment by Gene Callahan —
September 26, 2011 @ 9:26 am
“But the knowledge was lost of the full size; I believe Eratostosthenes or one of them Greeks with sticks and shadows got it right.”
The reason that the advisers of Ferdinand and Isabella told them not to fund Columbus was because they knew he couldn’t reach the Far East!
Comment by Alex Knapp —
September 26, 2011 @ 10:58 am
“Most of us libertarians, idiot savant autistics the lot, who are generally more correct on the principles than others (sorry Jim, the principles are still good despite your metamorphosis), still don’t get that because most do not understand people qua people, like good Aspergery folks they are, (hence the unseemly high attraction to miscreants like Ms Rand), despite the fact that they factor human incentives more correctly than other political groups into their calculations of program, policy and principle.”
This is completely wrong. People with Asberger’s/High Functioning Autism are terrible at determining incentives, because despite their high logic, they are literal minded and have severe difficulties bordering on impossibilities in imagining situations that they have never experienced. To analogize, this makes them great accountants but terrible investors, because they have trouble imagining a future that’s different from the present.