The Unlibertarian Center
by Matthew Yglesias
July 12th, 2007
I largely agree with what Brink Lindsey has to say. Except, unfortunately, for the parts about libertarianism. His observation that “traditional attitudes about race relations, sex, the role of women in society, the role of religion in public life, the permissible limits of artistic expression, and the nature of American cultural identity have taken a beating” is correct, and I share his apparent view that this is a good thing. Is it a libertarian thing? I tend to think not. Certainly Barry Goldwater, probably the most libertarian major party presidential nominee we’re likely to see, didn’t think much of a giant pile of regulations telling people what they can and can’t do with their own property called the Civil Rights Act. And, as a result, Goldwater’s highly libertarian 1964 campaign found that its core supporters were the white supremacists of the Deep South who saw libertarianism as a good way to blunt the onrushing tide of cultural change that hoped to use state authority to build a new, more racially tolerant America.
But, of course, the white supremacists (and the libertarians) lost that battle and the liberals won, building one important piece of the new, less traditional America that Lindsey observes we live in. Nor has the feminist movement’s success in transforming traditional attitudes about sex and the role of women been innocent of un-libertarian deployment of state power. Discriminating against women in the workplace has become not just inefficient or impolite but actually illegal thanks to a series of heavy-handed regulatory initiatives that no libertarian could in good conscience endorse.
Similarly, the gay rights movement does indeed want gay couples to be unmolested in their private conduct. But their demands go far beyond that. They want to regulate who you may employ, who you may rent a house to, etc., etc., etc. — not merely a state that refrains from discriminating, but a state that takes the lead in fighting discrimination.
To me, this is all to the good. And if Cato Institute employees want to endorse it, that’s all to the good as well. But it’s not libertarianism.
The case on the economic front is more mixed. There can be no doubt that the American economy has substantially deregulated over the past 30 years, starting during the Carter administration, and in part because of the efforts of libertarian thinkers. This is no small thing. It represents, however, a triumph of empirical persuasion, of convincing people that, say, the regulation of the airline industry was not, in fact, generating the outcomes people prefer. It didn’t reflect a more ideological triumph of the view that regulation of private property per se is illegitimate and so the economy, while less regulated overall, is substantially more regulated in certain areas, notably environmental protection and public health, where regulation has been deemed empirically effective.
And then, of course, there are the entitlements. As best I can tell, the extent of the federal government’s commitment to securing American citizens’ finances in retirement and in times of ill-health has increased fairly uniformly over the decades. Now and again, libertarians proclaim the programs aimed at achieving these ends to be unsustainable. Less frequently, they claim that the political moment has arrived when they can be curtailed. And yet, politicians who propose substantial curtailments of entitlements – Ronald Reagan in 1981, Newt Gingrich in 1995, George W. Bush in 2005 – inevitably live to regret it. If Lindsey is right that conservatives should admit that they won’t be able to roll back the sexual revolution, and that liberals pining away for the return of midcentury-style massive regulation should get over it, then surely libertarians interested in practical politics might want to consider that a federal commitment to health security and retirement security isn’t going away.
Indeed, Lindsey’s essay contains a decent explanation of why these programs are popular. On the subject of America’s postmodern turn on cultural matters he quotes Ronald Inglehart’s dictum that the shift in wordview “springs from the fact that there is a fundamental difference between growing up with an awareness that survival is precarious, and growing up with the feeling that one’s survival can be taken for granted.” Part of that greater sense of security over the decades has spring from economic growth pure and simple. And part of it has sprung from the existence of social insurance programs aimed at reducing people’s exposure to risk. What’s more, federal social insurance not only mitigates risk, but allows people a certain measure of freedom from institutions – parents, children, churches, employers – who, in the past, might have been potential providers of that security. This was, as I understand it, the basis of the old “fusionist” synthesis of libertarianism and conservatism – a weak welfare state was thought to bolster traditional autocratic structures of family and religious life, by forcing people into dependence on those institutions.
Somewhere along the line, however, at least some libertarians – Lindsey included – seem to have decided that they don’t like being handmaidens of a dour, reactionary outlook on culture and, indeed, are more interested in promoting cosmopolitan individualism as a way of life than in promoting a specific doctrine about the legitimate scope of state authority. A good companion to Lindsey’s essay is Reason editor Nick Gillespie’s February 2005 column in which he concedes that the sense in which Kansas is “freer” than New York City isn’t actually a sense he’s interested in. Kansas has fewer business regulations, but New York is more conducive to cosmopolitan individualism. This turn is, as far as I’m concerned, all to the good – cosmopolitanism is an excellent thing, as is individualism, whereas libertarianism is a bit silly.
That said, the risk in these formats is to wind up overstating the extent of disagreement. Lindsey and I agree that the changes in American society over the past forty or so years have been, broadly speaking, changes for the better. I, unlike Lindsey, think a sudden reversal of the decades-long trend toward greater government involvement in health care is neither likely nor desirable, but since Lindsey’s so enthusiastic about a period during which the public health state has relentlessly expanded, I suspect he’ll be pretty happy with the future we’re likely to get. If Lindsey wants to call the resulting moderately liberal synthesis “libertarian” I suppose that’s his business.
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Matthew Yglesias is an associate editor at The Atlantic Monthly.
July 13th, 2007 at 2:20 am
Brink Lindsey’s Marxist libertarianism
Over at Cato Unbound, Brink Lindsey has posted a precis of his book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture. I haven’t read it and I don’t plan to. I’ll just note quickly some passages that…
July 13th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
[...] MORE: They want to regulate who you may employ, who you may rent a house to, etc., etc., etc. — not merely a state that refrains from discriminating, but a state that takes the lead in fighting discrimination. [...]
July 14th, 2007 at 1:02 am
[...] There is no question a center exists in politics, but a libertarian one? Although one may credibly argue that a libertarian center can be dervied through a fusion of social liberalism and economic conservatism, it still leaves open the issues of trying to reconcile these positions to core libertarian positions - limited government , individual liberty and free markets. Both responders thus far, Jonah Goldberg and Matt Yglesias, allude to this problem. Goldberg writes: Lots of people call themselves libertarians. But, if you press them just a teensy bit, you discover they’re libertarians about the things they think government should have no business meddling in and pretty gung ho for government intrusions elsewhere. [...]
July 16th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Curing libertarian political impotence - a prescription for Electile Dysfunction
This theme is explored more broadly in Lindsey’s recent book The Age of Abundance (a book I have yet to read, but have queued up for my next Amazon order) and inspired the masthead and headline for the Cato Unbound theme. Others around the blogospher…
July 24th, 2007 at 11:03 am
[...] If It’s All Political, Then EVERYTHING Is Political Here’s this week’s column. There was more to say about Dr. Carmona after the Tribune’s own editorial last week, which you can read either excerpted in this column or here. My proposed headline is above, but the editor thought better, and this week, he’s right. TRIB EDITORIAL: ‘HIP-HIP, NO WAY’ East Valley Tribune, July 22, 2007 It’s half a cheer for the Tribune editorial page, which last Wednesday objected to the Bush administration’s political interference with former Surgeon General Richard Carmona. The Tribune objected “to the administration’s efforts to censor scientific inquiry in order to cater to a particular worldview.” The editorial also noted the administration’s “authoritarian attitude.” It’s nice to see that recognition by libertarians, who by my lights always talk philosophy but usually act for tax breaks for the well-to-do. Noticing that the Bush administration has pushed executive power beyond anything imagined by FDR or LBJ seems appropriate, if belated. At least Roosevelt proposed a court-packing plan, then withdrew it under withering criticism. Bush doesn’t bother with proposals, he just uses “signing statements” to tell Congress and the courts he doesn’t intend to follow the law. With Bush’s authoritarianism now duly noted, we’ll see if the Tribune ever follows through, or if, like Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Mesa, criticism of the Bush administration will go into the record but never actually surface when it might actually matter. It’s one of life’s little mysteries. The most vociferous libertarians are at state universities, where as part of their taxpayer-supported education or employment, they learn to divorce their political philosophy from actual experience. One example, noted by Matthew Yglesias, is how libertarians pretend that the huge pile of government regulations and restrictions known as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is somehow a libertarian concept. But this being the Tribune, they couldn’t oppose the Bush administration without making some fresh howlers. The first was a false equivalence, noting that the Clinton administration fired Dr. Joycelyn Elders as Surgeon General for “controversially endorsing sexual education to the degree where she suggested schools teach youths about masturbation.” Quoth the Tribune, “Her removal from office had nothing to do with science, but with politics and the embarrassment she brought to the Clinton administration.” Claiming Elders’s treatment was equivalent to Carmona’s requires you to believe that (1) it’s scientifically incontrovertible that you should (or need to) teach young people about masturbation, (2) therefore public opinion about the sex-ed curriculum is improper, and (3) a public official who says something really embarrassing to the administration shouldn’t be fired. This is, to put it charitably, a stretch. The other huge howler is the Tribune’s assertion that any position filled by the president is “inherently political” and therefore, “we should teach ourselves to be as suspect of their motives and influences as we are of experts in the private industry. An expert’s employment by the government simply should not be considered a sign of objectivity.” Read that paragraph again, slowly. First, it shows how the Bush administration hasn’t just trashed the Justice Department; they’ve degraded the whole concept of public service. Gen. David Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, was appointed by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate. Therefore, according to the Tribune, when Petraeus issues his progress report in September, we must suspect his motives and influences and not consider him as automatically objective. We’ll see if that happens. Second, there should be some difference between writing potboiler fiction and writing editorials, and the editorialists should leave the wildly-implausible conspiracy theories to Michael Crichton. How can government employees be simultaneously (1) lazy and inefficient, and (2) relentlessly and effectively bent on world domination? Lastly, this argument means that the Tribune has thrown in the towel on some past editorial positions, like the endorsement of the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, nuclear waste repository. If we should suspect every expert’s motives, especially those from the government, then why shouldn’t Nevada use every political trick available to stop that project, no matter how many studies say it’s safe? See, everybody has motives and influences, and even if the Tribune says the case is proved — well, who knows what motives and influences are at work on the page to my left? So fight on, Nevada; your friends in the East Valley have no cause to complain. Filed under: Really Angry Moderate by — Sam @ 12:03 pm [...]