Great Weekend Reading: Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

Submitted by John on Sat, 04/19/2008 - 6:39pm. Tags:

Politics

That is the title of this latest entry at The Art of the Possible, a libertarian/liberal fusionist website for deep discussion on the sometimes colliding, sometimes overlapping world views.

In this latest entry, Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings fame, submits a good piece about his political journey, his views, his views of libertarianism as it relates to liberalism as well as to politics in general. Overall, I'd say he's spot on and very realistic.

The journey starts in the aftermath of 9/11:

Back then I thought of myself as a man of “the Right,” though not a “conservative,” and pitched my arguments against promiscuous war, untrammelled security prerogatives and nationalism in “right-wing” terms, trying to explain how militarism, hegemony and torture contravene libertarian and conservative principles of limited government, humility and prudence.

That didn’t go so well.

Over time I came to think of myself as a man of “the Left” broadly considered. You could say this was due to events, not just Iraq and Gitmo but Terri Schiavo and gay marriage and all the right-wing “nanny-statism” of Bush-era Republicanism making clear that libertarianism and “small-government conservatism” have even less purchase on the “Right” than I thought they did years ago, when I never thought they had much to start.

He continues by stating the obvious:

Liberals and libertarians are not equal in any measure.

In terms of numbers, institutional infrastructure, organizational capacity and political energy, “libertarianism” hardly rises to the level of junior partner in any fusionism.

Very true...sadly enough. I personally would never pretend otherwise. And, as Henley points out, this is true regardless of how you define libertarianism....whether narrowly as strict anarcho-capitalist types like the Lew Rockwell Rothbardian group, or broadly (like me) as the more big tent and more loosely joined Cato/Reason types (glossed over for expediency as "economically conservative and socially liberal". The former is useless to liberalism while provoking even more useless fighting and the latter being unified, still too small at about 10% of the electorate and ultimately mutually inconvenient to either side due to the practicality, as Matthew Yglesias has pointed out, for the Dem leadership of catering to a small group that is at odds with about half of their agenda and risks angering and alienating its own base to win them over...something they obviously cannot do. Same on the GOP side.

the Democratic Party is becoming more populist economically, not less. Meanwhile the Republican Party is becoming more militarist and moralistic.

IOW, a double dead end for the Status Quo factions with little to gain and a lot to lose by searching out this small swing vote.

And as seen from the libertarian side, it's even less pleasant:

A “libertarian” who works on behalf of the Republican Party, formally or informally, will be helping to involve the country in longer and newer wars, and will be enabling retrograde policies toward pregnant women, gay people, recreational-drug consumers and people implicated, rightly or wrongly, in “terrorism” broadly defined. The “libertarian” who takes up the cause of upper-case Democrats will be working toward higher marginal tax rates, nationalized health care and broader regulation of finance and industry. There is no use pretending otherwise.

Tell me about it, Jimmy. *Sigh*

So, Henley draws his grand conclusion and I can't say I disagree. So what use are libertarians, politically, to liberals?...or conservatives for that matter? After all, we libertarians are simply not going to get exactly what we want any time soon and we aren't going to become liberals or conservatives any time sooner.

Says Henley rather insightfully: (emphasis mine)

I think libertarians are, rather, the court jesters of politics. I mean that in a good way. We whisper to Caesar that that he is mortal. We caper about, turning ourselves blue if necessary, reminding everyone that government power is inescapably violent and inescapably self-interested. You’re probably not going to care, but we’re going to make you actively decide not to care. And sometimes, maybe you’ll care after all. As a class, we can be stupendously silly people, believing and saying the most absurd things. But our rulers are silly people too, in different and more malignant ways. And as fools, we have the freedom to say so.

IOW, I guess the use will remain what it has always been: a small group of disloyal and non-partisan people whose words and views put subtle tugs and shoves on the mainstream consciousness and whose small successes materialize through the two party system when one side is bad enough to inspire the other to fight a libertarian-backed battle or two every once and a while. We saw in the 60s counter-culture and antiwar protests, in the late 70s and early 80s with some of Reagan's ideas, again in the mid 90s with the battle over Hillary-care and the '94 revolution and we see it again now against the Bush era. Where it will sway next is up to the stupidity of our two parties when one chooses to push the limits of stupidity just a bit too far and the libertarians will be there to help push back...at least for the moment.
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Henley responds (#90770)

by John on Mon, 04/21/2008 - 1:30pm

with a follow-up to the original post. In it he responds to two comments made by Ka1igu1a at the Freedom Democrats posting of this diary.

Henley responds at length to some of Kal's assertions about the future and future composition of the GOP and the Dems. Worth a read. Very interesting.

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I dunno, John, libertarianism ties in with US populism (#90662)

by Jordan on Sun, 04/20/2008 - 9:07am

on a lot of levels -- suspicion of government, laissez-faire economics, respect for individual competence, etc. The silent majority definitely tends to prefer economic conservatism & social liberalism (though with several NIMBY exceptions of course). The main thing that sets libertarianism apart is the attempt by many of its theorists to impose the "free market" as a cookie cutter solution to problems traditionally handled by gov't on some level. American populism, by contrast, lumps industrialists & "robber barons" together with big, intrusive government as a set of forces likely as not to roll right over the little people.

Wisely, in my view given that no market is "free" in the sense that all buyers & sellers are created equal -- some of us are more constrained by the law than others (thanks to rent seeking) while others are more constrained by finances & negotiating power.

In other words, libertarianism would be tapping into the mainstream of American political thought, except that people aren't really buying the idea that businessmen have the solution to all of their problems.

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH

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That's a strange view of populsim to me (#90675)

by John on Sun, 04/20/2008 - 12:13pm

or at least strange as libertarians tend to mean it.

A free market, broadly defined, has nothing to do with equality of buyers of sellers but a an equal freedom of all buyers and sellers to search and meet their needs and desires...or those of others (for personal gain)....so long as the natural rights of the individual are not infringed upon...IOW, no force or fraud or injury.

And no one is saying that business have all the answers. That's not the point at all. The point is that we, as individuals cooperating in society, under the rule of law that repsects and protects the individuals natural rights, tend to reach far more desirable results than when we force through a collective decision for everyone that go beyond the scope of protecting the individual. As a general rule of thumb, I think it's right.

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Great Weekend Reading: Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

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