The minute libertarians start giving equal time to private injustice, I predict they'll become a significant factor in electoral politics in America. The unfair politics and public policy and management that prevail in our often illiberal society bother the American people a lot. Classical liberals have superior answers to these problems, but voters won't take them seriously until they see in libertarian thought a far more energetic intellectual engagement with the problem of private injustice.
The second thing classical liberals need to do to keep their movement at the forefront of the next quarter century's politics is to become tireless advocates of measures to improve and strengthen the state. Not to enlarge it–the state, of course, is far too big, continues to grow at an alarming rate, and should be urgently and drastically scaled back. But this shrinking can be brought about only by the state itself, and for that to happen, the policy-making institutions of government must acquire a greatly enhanced ability to represent, deliberate, refine public opinion, and legislate.
Classical-liberal ideals can't be put into operation by just any collection of idiots in just any institutional context. As the founding fathers well knew, a classical-liberal polity requires intelligent, dedicated, principled leaders; institutions with a capacity both to resist and reflect public opinion; and processes able to make fine distinctions and sweeping decisions. The truth about our big government today is that it has been made big by its intellectual and moral weakness, its inability to represent and interpret public needs in a principled and effective way.
Real progress in bringing the activities of government in some semblance of political control and regaining some sense of moral proportion will take place only when legislators are restored to a status more akin to that envisioned by the founding fathers, who of course were acutely aware of the dangers of precisely the kind of politics we have today and who did everything they could think of to prevent it.
You'd think that classical liberals, having read their Madison and Jefferson, would be avid government strengtheners, but they aren't. They decry the lack of coherence of modern government, they express the wish that a more principled pattern of decision making
would prevail–and then they opt for punitive measures that are all but certain to further demoralize decision makers, further fragment the decision-making process, and in general render the government even more promiscuously responsive to self-serving political pressures than it is now.
An example is the Fully Informed Jury Amendment (FIJA), which would make explicit and emphatic the vague common-law tradition authorizing juries to invalidate odious laws. This measure would, in effect, introduce into the legislative process an indefinite veto power that would be present every time someone attempted to administer a legitimate act of the state. It is a script not for intelligent limited government that furthers individual rights but for chaos and injustice.
Similarly problematic was L.P. candidate Andre Marrou's oft-repeated pledge during last year's campaign to abolish the IRS, as if the IRS caused tax policy and as if the country would be better off without an agency to collect taxes while still keeping the tax laws on the books. This isn't to say that one might not eventually decide to change tax policy in a way that would make the IRS unnecessary. It is merely to say that the policy change has to come first and is the important and substantial part of the exercise. Getting rid of the agency, by itself, is, again, a script for chaos and injustice.
In this and other areas, the underlying assumption has been that big government is the enemy and that anything that harms the enemy must be good for the values the enemy is assailing. The fallacy, of course, is that big government, while something to be resisted, can't be dealt with as an enemy. The classical-liberal enterprise requires government of the right size and function. What harms the hypertrophied version of that government also harms the limited government inside trying to get out.
Classical liberals need to become not just government reformers but government strengtheners. They should be pushing not just the term-limitation amendment (which, in combination with other reforms, would help reconnect government with the public) but also more drastic reforms. My favorite is the notion of switching to a parliamentary system based on multi-member districts and proportional representation. Compared to the presidential system, with its separate institutions sharing powers, this would give a superior blend of insulation and answerability, representation and deliberation.
Last and not least, classical liberal have to become do-gooders and idealist and principled busybodies if they are to make progress in building a classical-liberal political culture. In private life, they should be entrepreneurs, tinkerers, free thinkers, meliorists, inveterate volunteers, sterling neighbors, faithful friends devoted parents, attentive lovers. They should cultivate and exhibit the virtues associated with voluntary, mutually beneficial relationships among equals. They should be fervent egalitarians. They should lean against academic social science's hierarchical vision of society, insist on the moral equality of all human bearers of natural and civil rights, and relate to fellow citizens with the active interest and warm human sympathy that is implied by the idea of taking each individual's rights seriously.
Both historically and logically, the classical liberal is a person devoted to liberal notions of human relations, to ideals of self-improvement, active citizenship, social fraternity, reason, and toleration. Classical liberals need not just to acknowledge but to get comfortable and involved with the communitarian and subjective dimensions of political life and human nature. We are individuals with rights, but we are also political beings for whom conducting a politics of rights and limits is a need and a source of personal fulfillment as well as a necessity.
In my opinion, in short, the way for libertarians to succeed in the decades ahead as they've succeeded in the decades just past is to self-consciously emulate the first American classical liberals, the founding fathers. In the personal examples of Washington, Madison, Jefferson, et al. are to be found the keys to the future as well as to the past. America today is at an impasse not so dissimilar to that which prevailed in the first new nation during the last quarter century of the 18th century. The answer now, as then, is to be found not in ideology or principle alone but equally in its embodiment in character, in active citizenship, in community, and in constitutional institutions and processes through which individual rights and community needs are reconciled intelligently and effectively with one another.
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