Best of the Blogs: Matthew Yglesias vs. Tim Lee
by The Editors
October 12th, 2006
Libertarian Democrats
by Matthew Yglesias
matthewyglesias.com
October 11, 2006
I thought I might comment a bit on Markos’ “libertarian democrats” concept since, technically, abstract political theory is actually what I know about. But let me start off with a little political analysis. Insofar as we’re talking about attracting libertarian voters, I think the case that libertarians should vote Democratic in 2006 is ironclad. A Pelosi-led House of representatives, and to a lesser extent a Reid-led Senate, would provide more of an obstacle to the Bush administration’s imperialist instincts than the reverse. Either would offer some oversight of the executive branch and to some extent curb Bush’s taste for gross abuses of power. Neither would really be in a position to enact any grandiose economic policy plans. So Q.E.D., as I see it. For the future, though, it’s just going to depend on circumstances.
Meanwhile, I don’t see any reason to believe it would be smart for a major political party to deliberately aim at the votes of some libertarian constituency. The reason is that, to a decent first approximation, about zero percent of the electorate is primarily motivated by a principled opposition to state coercion. We’re not literally talking about zero people, I know some of them, and some write blogs, but it’s genuinely a rounding error in the scheme of things. You do have some people who adhere to the Economist-style center-right politics of the American elite consensus, and this view has some similarities with libertarianism, but this genuinely is an elite consensus voting bloc rather than a libertarian one. It’s also not seriously accessible to the Democrats over the long-run because a core element of the consensus is a fairly deep-seated loathing of progressive activism and progressive activists. It’s worth understanding that, at the end of the day, there’s much less libertarianism in American society than people sometimes think.
For one thing, a lot of the views liberals tend to think of us libertarian-ish liberal positions aren’t actually especially libertarian at the end of the day. For example, liberals, like libertarians, don’t think the coercive authority of the state should be deployed to discriminate against gays and lesbians. Unlike libertarians, however, liberals generally think the coercive authority of the state should be deployed to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians. We think that landlords shouldn’t be allowed to refuse to rent houses to gay men, that bartenders shouldn’t be allowed to refuse to serve them, that employers shouldn’t be allowed to fire them, etc. Liberals believe in a certain notion of human liberation from entrenched dogma, prejudice, and tradition, but this isn’t the same as hostility to state action, even in the sex-and-gender sphere.
Similarly, it’s often said that the interior west manifests a libertarian or proto-libertarian politics. I see, however, very little support for this view. We’re talking about a portion of the country that derives its economic viability largely from huge levels of subsidy from the rest of the country. From the Universal Service Fee that makes telephones in the rural west cheap, to the way highway money disproportionately flows to sparsely-populated states, to agricultural subsidies and protectionism, to cheap exploitation of natural resources (lumber, coal, metals, grazing) on federally-owned land, these are people who very much enjoy sucking on the federal teat. A principled libertarianism would sell horribly in Montana. It is true that Jon Tester is cutting ads about the Patriot Act that get Jim Henley hot and bothered but this is on a limited domain of topics.
More to the point, what Tester is really appealing to here isn’t libertarianism, as such, but an American self-conception and rhetoric of rugged individualism. This certainly is a sentiment one tends to see in the West. The dense living conditions of the coasts naturally incline people toward a sort of gut-level collectivism and fear of chaos that you don’t see in the West. This is an important phenomenon, since even though it’s geographical and demographic range isn’t what it once was, it’s deeply entrenched in the broader American political tradition so it resonates at least somewhat everywhere.
And I heartily agree that this is something Democrats and liberals ought to try to do better to tap into. Our best shot at it, however, isn’t to become “more libertarian” but to simply run with the somewhat tired positive freedom agenda. There’s a long tradition, dating all the way back to John Stuart Mill’s personal trajectory, of seeing modern — i.e., egalitarian — liberalism as the appropriate successor-ideology to what was valuable in classical liberalism’s ideology of negative liberty. The Morality of Freedom, on this view, requires people to not merely by free of formal constraint but to have the actual capacity to practice autonomy and self-creation which, under contemporary circumstances, requires some level of state provision of public goods and social insurance.
The pioneering German social democrat Eduard Bernstein, to whom “liberal” meant “libertarian,” wrote “with respect to liberalism as. a great historical movement, socialism is its legitimate heir, not only in chronological sequence, but also in its spiritual qualities, as is shown moreover in every question of principle in which social democracy has had to take up an attitude” and that “The aim of all socialist measures, even of those which appear outwardly as coercive measures, is the development and the securing of a free personality.”
Proper libertarians have all heard this line of reasoning, and they disagree with it, which is what makes them libertarians. For electoral purposes, though, the key issue isn’t serious ideological libertarians, but simply people with a very autonomy-oriented emotional makeup. This way of framing egalitarian liberal politics has some reasonable chance of succeeding at persuading people of that sort. But it isn’t libertarianism, it’s simply the orthodox egalitarian view of how to understand egalitarianism.
Libertarian Democrats
by Tim Lee
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog
October 12, 2006
I’ve been meaning to comment on this month’s Cato Unbound subject, the “Libertarian Democrats” for a week now. Matt Yglesias’s comments provide a good excuse to do so:
I don’t see any reason to believe it would be smart for a major political party to deliberately aim at the votes of some libertarian constituency. The reason is that, to a decent first approximation, about zero percent of the electorate is primarily motivated by a principled opposition to state coercion. We’re not literally talking about zero people, I know some of them, and some write blogs, but it’s genuinely a rounding error in the scheme of things. You do have some people who adhere to the Economist-style center-right politics of the American elite consensus, and this view has some similarities with libertarianism, but this genuinely is an elite consensus voting bloc rather than a libertarian one. It’s also not seriously accessible to the Democrats over the long-run because a core element of the consensus is a fairly deep-seated loathing of progressive activism and progressive activists. It’s worth understanding that, at the end of the day, there’s much less libertarianism in American society than people sometimes think.
I should start by noting the dangers of the pundit fallacy are almost overwhelming here. With that said, however, I think Matt’s being rather unfair. In the first place, he’s absolutely right that the constituency for principled libertarianism is pretty close to zero. But the same is true of principled anything. Walter Mondale went down in flames by staking out the principled position that he would raise taxes if elected. So asking how many principled libertarians there are is the wrong question.
The right question is how many voters are inclined toward rhetoric and policies that move things in a libertarian direction–i.e. they find anti-government rhetoric compelling and support things like tax cuts, civil liberties, deregulation, free trade, etc. There’s all sorts of evidence that the number isn’t zero. Let’s start with a guy named Ronald Reagan. If Matt hasn’t listened to Reagan’s 1980 Republican convention speech and his 1981 inaugural address, I suggest he do so. It’s 200 proof libertarianism, and it won him two elections (three if you count George H.W. Bush who largely ran on Reagan’s legacy). Obviously, Reagan wasn’t a perfectly principled libertarian, but libertarian themes formed the centerpiece of his governing philosophy, and it didn’t seem to hurt him in the polls.
That was 25 years ago. What about today? The Cato Institute today released a study showing that about 13 percent of the electorate has libertarian leanings. And they’ve been shifting towards Democrats lately. They split 80-20 for Bush in 2000, but only 60-40 for Bush in 2004. My guess is that this trend will continue in 2006, given that George W. Bush hasn’t done anything libertarian since getting re-elected.
Matt concedes that there’s an “elite consensus block” with libertarian leanings, but he argues that the Democrats are never going to win their support because “a core element of the consensus is a fairly deep-seated loathing of progressive activism and progressive activists.” But this is silly. It’s equally true that much of that block has a deep-seated loathing of the religious right. Yet that hasn’t stopped them from pulling the lever for Republicans. Politics, by its nature, involves compromises and trade-offs. During the second half of the 20th Century politics tended to break down over lines of economic policy, with free marketeers on one side and advocates for activist government on the other. Libertarians held their noses and voted for Republicans with views on social issues they found repugnant because they thought that economic issues were more pressing. But there’s nothing pre-ordained about this. This libertarian, at least, is most interested in voting for a party that won’t shred the Bill of Rights or start World War III, even if it means voting for a candidate whose views on economics are a bit to the left of center.
This is particularly true because a centrist Democrat could easily paint the GOP as the party of reckless over-spending without committing himself to reducing the size of government. At this point, I’ll gladly throw in my lot with a Democrat who campaigns on the Clinton legacy of balanced budgets and moderate spending growth if it’s coupled with libertarian views on social issues and opposition to preemptive war. A Democrat who campaigned as a deficit hawk could attract a significant number of libertarian votes without alienating any of the traditional Democratic constituencies. That seems to me like something that the Democratic leadership ought to seriously consider.
