Libertarian Words, Conservative Mouths
In 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 non-theoretical example of the kind of thing I’m talking about.
In 1992, Jeffrey Bell published Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality. While the book is not much discussed these days, that’s something of an injustice. Bell’s book crystalized the pseudo-libertarian “populist” conservative case against (liberal) elites. Fred Barnes, who is useful as a barometer of what conservatives find rhetorically useful, called it “the most important political book of 1992.” Bell continues to have a nice career in the nexus of social conservatism, goldbuggery and finance. (It does still get cited by conservative authors, e.g. Matthew Continetti in his Sarah Palin fanfic.) I had a couple of very nice chats with him at author events my bookstore ran during the year his book came out.
Bell:
Populism I see as optimism about people’s competence to handle their own affairs. Elitism I see as optimism about an elite’s ability to handle the affairs of the people, always in comparison.
This isn’t libertarianism as such, though an animating spirit of libertarianism is “nobody knows how to run your life better than you do.” Mostly it’s a hash. In practice, Bell considers it “populist” to minimize business regulation, and considers core tenets of the Reconstruction-era Republican Party – “They were protectionists; they were for softer money; they were against immigration” - “elitist” because, well, I can only conclude it’s because Bell disliked protectionism, soft money and immigration restriction. Labor leaders are probably elitist, per Bell, because they deprecate the individual union-member’s ability to look out for his own interests. But someone who deprecates the gay man’s ability to look out for his own penis, and his own heart, is a populist. From issue to issue, Bell skitters from individualism to collective as the proper scale of “handling their own affairs,” in a way that lines up perfectly with what was then the social-conservative political program. (In 1992, there was much less material hostility to the unrestricted immigration favored by libertarians and business, er, elites.)
Obviously, Bell’s categories are an analytical hash. The highest compliment we can pay him is to say it takes a lot of thinking to develop a schema that makes so little sense. And don’t imagine for a moment that Bell is merely cynical. Self-serving, yes, but sincerely so.
Again, Bell isn’t using strictly libertarian terms here. But he annexes fathers of “limited government” like Jefferson into the populist camp. And the hostility to “elite” management of ordinary lives and “optimism about people’s competence to handle their own affairs” are traditional wellsprings of opposition to “big government.”
Bell’s career and views are part and parcel of the post-Reagan Republican Right, including Grover Norquist, whose “Leave Us Alone” coalition – the direct ancestor of Tea-Party Republicanism – is more directly “limited government” in rhetoric. Rhetorically, Norquist doesn’t have the option of Bell’s incoherence on issues like gay rights and abortion, so he instead uses various minimization and distraction strategies when answering “adult questions.” These are as grimly amusing as they are unpersuasive. Norquist really is a cynic of the type libertarians tend to imagine all Republican “small-government hypocrites” to be.
Operationally, though, Norquist sets up a “limited government” tent that shelters theocrats and rent-seekers. These people are free to skitter from individual to fictional individual (i.e. corporations) to group when deciding what the nominal proper unit of “self-rule” is. So subsidies to trains become elitist while subsidies to highways become populist. Propping up wind-power in the marketplace is socialism; doing the same for nuclear power is the wisdom of the founders.
But again, this isn’t even cognitive dissonance. This is an alternate understanding of terms. For instance, Julian is surely familiar of a longstanding strain of argument in libertarian fora that “limited government” presupposes a specifically Christian society. Without a cultural commitment to Christian virtue, “self rule” is impossible. And that’s from people who are systematically engaged with libertarian thought as such. For people who are instead systematically engaged with Fox News, the conflation is all the easier.
Comment by Tim Hall —
September 25, 2011 @ 1:31 pm
I’ve always understood “Populism” to mean “Pandering to the basest instincts of the electorate”.
Comment by William Burns —
September 25, 2011 @ 2:00 pm
Irrespective of the virtues of this argument, anything which gets Jim blogging again is good (short of another war).
Comment by Killing in the Lame of —
September 25, 2011 @ 2:13 pm
The Golden Rule, redefined, for the autonomy types:
I gots mine; fuck you.
Comment by Julian Sanchez —
September 25, 2011 @ 3:03 pm
Well, “populist” is inherently a rather more protean term; even used according to the dictionary sense it can cover any policy (you claim that) “the masses” are in favor of.
And again, if it were REALLY just an “alternate understanding of terms,” then the observation that subsidizing nuclear power isn’t “free market” (or whatever) wouldn’t really require a response, even an evasive or minimizing one. At best, it would provoke a lecture on our linguistic incompetence. Conservative responses to these critiques suggest they are using terms in a sufficiently similar way to understand the tension.
Now, I think it’s true that conservatives SAY “limited government” or “strict constructionist” without thinking too clearly about what that implies, because it’s a way of slapping something that sounds like a principle on an incoherent mash of tribal shibboleths and cultural grievances. But the fact that they WANT an appearance of principle, rather than just owning their bundle of shibboleths–arguably the more genuinely “conservative” approach–still signals a commitment to the sense over whatever they take to be the reference at any given time.
Comment by matthew h —
September 25, 2011 @ 7:38 pm
Ditto to William Burns on the blogging.
Though Jim is doing a great job reminding me why my shards should not be tending towards official conservatism it is having less effect on why they should not remain libertarian.
The fact that there is a whole industry of office, status, and donation-seekers that conflates prejudice and principle, and foists sophistry which undermines useful and moral rules of wise humane thumb/principle about political economy is not new, it may even be the central problem of history and government, and it is to limit that beast that good libertarian values are or should be directed.
Comment by Thoreau —
September 25, 2011 @ 9:15 pm
First, what William Burns said.
Second, when people pay lip service to a word, I do think it’s interesting to ponder exactly what, if anything, it signifies. I kind of lean toward Jim’s view that it’s just a label, not being used in the way we mean it, or in the way that it “ought” (in some sense) to mean. One answer might be that, while they don’t necessarily value “limited government” (in whatever understanding) as much as they might claim, they attach some non-zero weight to it, and overstate that weight as a form of signaling. They probably do value (some aspects of) federalism and limited government, but they value other things even more, and will jettison “limited government” (or whatever) if it conflicts with those other things. Saying that you value A less than B doesn’t mean that you attach zero value to B.
Also, I think that they value the general idea behind those things, even if not the practice, as a cultural and signaling thing. However, this value is loose enough that any libertarian attempt to prove hypocrisy will fail. They don’t really value it all the way up to 11, so pointing out that they don’t value it to 11 will not impress them.
Comment by Alex Knapp —
September 26, 2011 @ 11:00 am
“Limited Government” has, in popular parlance, simply mophed into a cultural signifier of “not liberal.”
Comment by Thoreau —
September 26, 2011 @ 1:38 pm
That’s a much shorter way of saying what I tried to say in my subsequent post.
Comment by matthew h —
September 26, 2011 @ 2:47 pm
What Alex Knapp said.
Comment by Larry M —
September 26, 2011 @ 3:52 pm
I think we can differentiate between different segments of the conservative movement, no? There are cynics who use the terms as effective buzz words without believing it for a second, and then there are a bunch of people – some of them unreflective, who, if pressed, probably really would define terms like “small government” and “federalism” in a manner very different than the literal meanings.
There are maybe a few people caught int he middle who really believe the kind of bullshit rationalizations that Julian references – let’s call them the “we had to burn your freedoms in order to save them” crowd – but I think they are a minority.