Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Whither Liberaltarianism?   [Jonah Goldberg]

As I read Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson these days quite a bit, I think I'm on safe ground when I say they are suitably vexed by the stimulus bill and its chief defenders.

Which gets me wondering: Whatever happened to liberaltarianism? You may recall that Brink led the charge for a kind of rebranding of libertarianism a couple years a go, one that involved forging a new liberal-libertarian alliance. Will Wilkinson, disatisfied with the trace euphonious elements still detectable in the word "liberaltarianism" dubbed it "Rawlsekianism." Meanwhile, at a lower level of abstraction, libertarians like David Boaz argued that libertarians are the new swing voters.

While, all of these guys are impressive thinkers, I was unconvinced on both the theoretical and practical levels. I wrote about it for the magazine here.

My objection to the swing voter argument, in short:

The problem here is that "libertarian" is a shmoo-like word but libertarians are not shmoo-like people (shmoos being the magical creatures from Lil' Abner who could take any form and be anything). Everyone likes to think he's in favor of maximizing freedom. But in reality most folks want to maximize only the freedoms they like. I often ask self-described libertarians if they support government censorship of hardcore pornography on Saturday-morning broadcast television. If they say yes, then they aren't really pure libertarians. If they say no, I congratulate them on their consistency and tell them why their political ambitions are doomed.

"Libertarian-leaning" people are often quite severe about which "freedoms" they want liberalized and which they don't. Indeed, they're often single-issue voters. Just ask the folks at Libertarians for Life. Meanwhile, some doctrinaire libertarians are fixated on legalizing drugs, others on gay marriage, and some, amazingly enough, on defending the moral legitimacy of the Confederacy. A bloc of centrist swing voters this ain't. The point is that most of the talk about "libertarians" switching sides has been exactly that, talk.

My objections to the Rawlsekianism stuff are too lengthy to get into here in detail. But one point I would make is that just as a conservatism unwilling to conserve classical liberalism isn't worth conserving, a libertarianism that isn't first and foremost about defending economic liberty isn't libertarianism so much as libertinism. To Cato's lasting credit, they recognize that their first obligation is to fight on economic turf and they've been doing a great job at it.

But it seems to me that the stimulus debate clearly puts the lie to the idea that liberals and libertarians can see eye to eye on the large questions of political economy, at least for the foreseeable future. The first principles simply aren't aligned. The theoretical arguments in favor of the stimulus amount to rubbing the libertarian cat's fur backwards. And the so-called "libertarian center" hardly seems to be decisive or even relevant to the public debate. In the most important and fundamental debate about the role of government in a generation, the libertarians are lining-up with, and even marching out in front of, the conservatives.

Am I right? Was the liberaltarian debate the sort of debate — like the End of History — that comes about during relatively prosperous times, when minor questions seem major? But now seem fanciful once the big issues re-surface? I'd be curious to know what Brink and Will think, but only time will tell.

02/11 10:25 AMShare