Do-Good Libertarianism

Paul H. Weaver from the May 1993 issue

REASON's first quarter century was about as successful as the intellectual journalism life gets. Around the time the magazine got under way, the world was independently turning away from authoritarian politics of all kinds–from the jack-booted totalitarianism of Lenin and Hitler to the subtle, pseudo-constitutional oligarchy of Pulitzer, Wilson, and Theodore Vail. Thus, as Bob Poole & Co. created a new journalistic idiom in which to articulate the classical-liberal understanding of the state and the individual, the world, searching for the road out of serfdom, naturally beat a path to their doorway. Today, it seems, nearly everyone is speaking the language of free markets and free minds.

And the result is...Bill Clinton.

Clinton, the center-seeking crypto-leftist Democrat, illustrates both how much has been accomplished and how much remains to be done. People, even leftish Democrats, have put away a lot of the old statist rhetoric, taught themselves to speak the language of freedom, and are experimenting with the methods of freedom. It was a Democrat named Jimmy Carter, let us not forget, who was the deregulation president, and quite possibly his cousin from Little Rock will rack up an equally awesome pro-market achievement in one policy arena or another. But much of this new interest in freedom ends up advancing the same old authoritarianism. In other words, while the world has begun talking the language of freedom, it is still seemingly a long way from really internalizing the values of freedom.

The task facing classical liberals in the quarter century to come is to study, discuss, and proselytize for those values of freedom–for self-respect, toleration, rationality, and commitment to constitutional processes. Having established a beachhead in the rhetorical lowlands of modern politics, we should now resolutely push inland and seek to conquer the entire territory. In other words, we should start focusing on the purposes people pursue within the political system and the culture that shapes those purposes. The time has come to wage a war for hearts as well as minds, and to recover or re-create a classical-liberal culture.

This will be a difficult mission for libertarians. Not because a liberal culture is a particularly tough sell in America–to the contrary, if ever there was a society that was ready to return to its true philosophical roots, this is it–but because building a liberal culture will require perspectives and character traits and skills radically different from those that brought libertarians, and REASON, to where they are today.

Throughout most of the 20th century, classical liberalism was a fringe movement in a statist world, and its message often–and quite rightly–came down to little more than the injunction, no! Sometimes in a spirit of high moral seriousness, at other times in the less exalted spirit of an adolescent or even a 2-year-old, classical liberals have said no: no to the state, no to government intervention in the market, no to the wars that have been such a central feature of modern society, no to the sometimes well-intentioned efforts by liberal reformers to make the world a better place through public policy, no to the self-serving pragmatism that dominates the university, no to most of the political movements that have shaped our century. Last summer, when the editor of REASON sent me off to Michigan and Connecticut to cover the campaign of the Libertarian Party's presidential ticket, nothing was more striking than the polemical, negatively framed quality of the pitches and personae.

The negative posture, though sometimes perverse, made a lot of sense in the 20th century. In the first place, it enabled classical liberals to survive in a world that was almost monolithically hostile to their point of view. And it preserved their core beliefs intact. Thus, when conventional liberalism collapsed of its own dumb weight in the '60s, the classical liberals were there to pick up the pieces and get the credit. They were one of the very few groups to which a disillusioned ax-liberal could rally and feel that he really was saying goodbye to all that, once and for all. To me personally, coming to classical liberalism in middle age during the Reagan years, its uncompromising and uncompromised quality was one of its most compelling attributes.

But if "no" worked fine when the historical mission was to discredit and defeat an authoritarian polity, it won't get us far in the years ahead. Now the name of the game is not simply to stop authoritarianism and the state but to build a classical-liberal culture to replace the now-discredited statist ethos. And to do that, classical liberals will have to turn to the positive side of their creed and their natures.

Politics is not a debate; you don't win if you refute your opponents' arguments. Politics is the mostly cooperative activity of coming together around a set of values and institutions. It isn't combat so much as it is community. It's affirmation more than negation. To build successfully on the last quarter century's progress and remain at the cutting edge, libertarians will have to transform themselves into activists, glad-handers, do-gooders, reformers, idealists, and scourges of injustice. They'll have to learn to think like the last group of classical liberals in America who found themselves in a situation like the one we're in today, the founding fathers.

In practice, this means making three big changes in the prevailing classical-liberal Weltanschauang.

First, classical liberals have got to become obsessed with the injustice that is rampant in our world. They should always have been obsessed with injustice, since they're committed to such high and

demanding ideals, but the truth is they've been squishy soft on it. They have been obsessed with the growth of the state and with the ideology and ideologues that justify the state. By contrast, they have tended to turn a blind eye to fraud and coercion in the private sector, ignoring the active threat to classical-liberal values posed by private power and private ambition for privilege.

Ordinary people in the real world are only too acutely aware of the injustice and politicization that are rampant in every area, from the hiring hall to the family dinner table to the local zoning code. When they hear classical liberals assail wrongs in the public sector but not in the private sector, they worry that the talk about markets is a cover for private injustice. And this is no mere theoretical concern. After all, since the early New Deal days, big business has advocated markets and limited government with respect to the agendas of labor unions and consumer groups, while quietly seeking government intervention in their own interest. In much the same way, racists, sexists, homophobes, and others who would dishonor and trample their fellow citizens’ rights have urged freedom as a cover for their unjust behavior–but have denied the same freedom to the people they hold in contempt.

The fact is–libertarians know this, of course, but don't really take it to heart– that we live in a society that has been deeply corrupted in all areas and at all levels by the politics of privilege. Throughout the present century the big corporation has sought to control market processes in its own interest, rather than submit to the market process and work to perfect that process. In some cases, this has happened through the pursuit of political privilege. Just as often, however, corporate executives misbehave on a far more direct and personal level–by, for instance, lying to customers or colleagues to achieve results honesty wouldn't produce. Such behavior is wrong, it violates the rights on which a liberal society depends, and classical liberals ought to be upset about it.

Similarly, throughout the present century, there has been a high level of racial, religious, sexual, and ideological aggression and exploitation. The private sector has been no haven of decency and principle; it has been essentially as much a jungle as the state has been. Yet liberalism, to triumph in the political sphere, requires certain values and behavior in the private sphere–respect for individuals, honesty, decent treatment of one another. A society based on tolerance, mutually beneficial exchange, and rational persuasion cannot be built by merely changing the structure of government.

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.26.10 @ 8:17PM|#

hzegd

log in or register to reply