Forcing Freedom

Can liberalism be spread at gunpoint?

Ronald Bailey, Christopher Preble, Christopher Hitchens & Ivan Eland from the August/September 2003 issue

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War Can Be an Engine of Dynamism and Innovation

Christopher Hitchens

The question as put by Ronald Bailey is both more and less severe, in its implications for libertarians, than it first appears. To what extent does libertarianism, or any other philosophy, take the existence of a constitutional and continental United States for granted? Is libertarianism, to put it more shortly, protected by state power?

The bluntest instance of this problem in practice might be that of Abraham Lincoln, who was not only prepared to kill any number of actual or potential United States citizens, and to level and bombard their cities, but also ready to suspend habeas corpus and other protections, even for those who agreed with him. Many have compared Lincoln's "nation building" to the erection of the over-mighty state, and Gore Vidal openly suggests in his wonderful novel Lincoln that Honest Abe belongs in the same category as Bismarck. The fact must also be faced that the Emancipation Proclamation -- prelude to the full abolition of chattel slavery and the holding of people as property -- was conceived as a limited war measure only.

War is the health of the state, as was pointed out by the leftist Randolph Bourne in the early years of what was then called the Great War. But war has also, like revolution, been an engine of dynamism and innovation (let's agree not to call this "progress" too glibly). It's also been an occasion, at least sometimes, for the extension of rights and of the role of the autonomous citizen.

It would be nice to think that we could choose our allies or proxies on the basis of their similarity to our "own" ideals. But we would first have to be sure that these were, in fact, our ideals. And we would in any case have to make a prudent guess as to how long it might take for us to be vindicated in that choice. The Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, for example, was as far as I can see a much better ally than the Taliban. But how far can I, or any of us, be expected to see?

I have never heard it argued that Lincoln's extra-ordinary measures on the legal and authoritarian front, any more than his permission for Unionists to pay others to take their place in the ranks of the army, actually advanced the cause. One might well have had one with-out the other(s). Censorship in wartime, for example, usually turns out to be even more stupid than censorship in peacetime. The trade-off between freedom and security, so often proposed so seductively, very often leads to the loss of both. It is plain to anyone that John Ashcroft is too doltish to hold the office of attorney general in war or peace, is illiterate as regards the Constitution, and despises the idea of church-state separation for which, in part, we are supposed to be fighting. Who can propose that we are made safer by being denied even the names of those who are imprisoned under his special legislation?

It has been encouraging, to me at least, to see how many libertarians and conservatives have been willing to challenge the more exorbitant points of the USA PATRIOT Act. It's also been depressing to have made their objection to Ashcroft into an underhanded opposition to a war against a clear and present danger. The requirement of an oath to the Constitution is that it commits you to uphold it against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Given the fact that a very convincing attempt has been made to form a secret army within our borders, and to connect it with a lethal theocratic movement overseas, I'm very unimpressed by anyone who wants to counterpose these two elements of the commitment.

I somehow doubt that a superpower, however defined (even as a democratic or liberal superpower) can ever practice a "libertarian" foreign policy. Neither the populist nor the elite version of such a system seems to lend itself to limited government. However, it can perhaps be made, with a protracted struggle, to uphold the anti-totalitarian and above all secular values for which it claims to be contending. These are not easy times to be a libertarian, whether civil or social. But the easy time for that will never arrive. It's supposed to be difficult.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest book is A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (Plume).

The Perils of Global Libertarian Utopianism

Christopher Preble

The state poses the greatest threat to liberty, and the greatest expansions of state power occur during times of threat -- both real and imagined. To protect us from these threats, and ultimately from the state, Ronald Bailey advocates an aggressive foreign policy "aimed at building a free world sooner rather than later." Bailey argues that this policy would be only temporary, and that the ultimate goal would be the creation of a new order, whereby liberty could be guaranteed at home without the need for "an intrusive national security apparatus."

This is global libertarian utopianism. By this logic, freedom-loving people will use government action to mold a perfect, free world. But if libertarians are opposed to government action to make a perfect domestic world, why discard those principles beyond the water's edge?

The practical and moral difficulties of welfare-statism on the domestic front pale in comparison to those of global libertarian utopianism. For one, Bailey vastly underestimates the capacity of the state to hold onto power once that "new" world is created, once the unfree are made free. He also underestimates what it would actually take to force democracy down the throats of the approximately 3 billion people who currently live under some other system of government.