Monday, December 04, 2006

The Lib-Lib Dream Palace   [Jonah Goldberg]

From a reader:

 

Let me add a little historical perspective to the Brink Lindsey piece.

 

The dream of a libertarian-liberal alliance has been a staple of libertarian strategizing forever. Lindsey’s boss, Ed Crane, has trotted it out every few years since Cato was founded in the ‘70s. Before Crane, it was a bedrock precept of Murray Rothbard, the true mastermind of American libertarianism. Rothbard adopted this strategy around 1950.

 

The hinge of the strategy is something Lindsey doesn’t discuss: foreign policy. Rothbard’s foreign policy trademark was radical non-interventionism – WWII, WWI, Viet Nam, Civil War, Cold War, doesn’t matter. He was opposed to all of them. The idea of liberals aligning with libertarians is based on their common hostility to American foreign policy. That was true in 1950, and it’s true today.

 

What’s the reason those swing voters went D this time? Iraq – something libertarians oppose on dogmatic and philosophical, rather than prudential, grounds. One can always count on virtually all libertarians and a major slice of liberals opposing any US foreign intervention, and this is what has caused three generations of libertarians to imagine a new libertarian majority right around the corner.

 

So far, it hasn’t panned out. Rothbard supported Kennedy in 1960, thinking he would appoint Stevenson Secretary of State, and that would be the end of the Cold War. Subsequent moves were equally lame. Viet Nam and the nuclear freeze were also regarded as common ground in their day and potential glue for a grand alliance.

 

Who knows? Maybe something will come of it this time. But the track record suggests this is a chimera attractive mostly to political entrepreneurs in both camps who think they can put one over.

 

Lindsey’s piece has a lot of interesting ideas about possible future dialectical movement in such things as entitlement reform. That may actually happen. But that’s just the normal give and take of politics, not some dramatic philosophical realignment.

 

A broad lib-lib coalition would be based on a strict non-interventionist foreign policy which is often difficult to distinguish from leftist anti-Americanism. Wonder why Lindsey doesn’t go into that.

 

12/04 03:27 PMShare