The following excerpts are from today’s Jonah Golberg The Goldberg File, a National Review newsletter we highly recommend. Sure we know matters are more nuanced than he characterizes “libertarianism” and we disagree with some assertions. Frankly we don’t think we know any “libertarians” that aren’t really a mixed bag, different mix than us perhaps. Call us selective libertarians, or liberty defaulters, or constitutional conservatives, or free-market champions, or TEA Party types or culture defenders, or whatever. But we found the article generally worthy and especially liked the distinctions and assertions he makes regarding liberals/progressives. Also, that there is not real common cause between liberals and libertarians.
. . . Libertarianism is a bigger threat to conservatism among young people than liberalism is because given the culture today libertarianism is easier than conservatism. To be a conservative you not only have to judge people, you have to judge people out loud. And making judgments about right and wrong is a sin in today’s secular culture . . .
• Perhaps the most annoying thing about libertarianism is its blind spot about the importance of community. Ayn Rand and Barack Obama share the view that there are only two important institutions: the individual and the state. The difference is Rand thought the state is evil and Barack Obama thinks it is awesome. The truth is closer to the middle. Well, let me modify that. The state in the Bismarckian/Wilsonian sense sucks. But government is not evil. Oh, it can be. But it needn’t be. Sure, semantically you can make the case that it is a necessary evil, but I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Nothing truly necessary can be evil. Gravity is not evil. Food and shelter are not evil. There are things we need to do collectively. That’s why the Founders wrote the Constitution. Its genius lay in the fact that it understood that government is necessary but not sufficient for a good life.
• Let’s talk foreign policy. Rand Paul’s foreign policy isn’t libertarian because there is no such thing as libertarian foreign policy. Oh, sure, the majority of libertarians are either non-interventionist or isolationist (more the former than the latter), but the reason we call those ideas libertarian isn’t because the internal logic of the philosophy requires non-interventionism or isolationism. It’s because that’s where non-interventionists and isolationists have found a home. This understandably will offend many libertarians who are sincere non-interventionists. But the fact is that there is a very clear demarcation between the international realm and the national realm. How we order our internal arrangements must be different than how we order our external ones. Inside the fortress we can believe in maximalist notions of individual liberty. But the Constitution (libertarian-ly understood) by definition doesn’t apply to individuals or nation-states outside our borders. Contrary to the claims of many hawks and neoconservatives (not the same thing!) as a matter of fact and logic no libertarian is an isolationist. Isolationists do not believe in free trade or open borders. Q.E.D.
• Non-interventionism’s moment is probably starting to wind down. I’m pretty sure it cannot withstand sustained news cycles of jihadists burying children alive and crucifying Christians. Non-interventionism seems brilliant when intervention is — or seems to be — a bad idea. Rand Paul has benefitted enormously from the relative calm we’ve been living under for the last several years. As Seth Mandel explains in a really insightful post, “A stable global order is a great time to be a noninterventionist.”
• Oh, for you constitutionalist libertarians, you might ponder the fact that the reason we swapped out the Articles of Confederation for the Constitution was that the Barbary pirates were getting all up in our business and we needed to pay for a navy to open a can of whoop-ass on them.
• When it comes to the federal government in the domestic sphere, I’m pretty damned libertarian. But I am also damn near a hippy communitarian when it comes to everything else. The libertarians in Draper’s essay talk a great game about individual liberty and there’s no end of sneering at social conservatives. But in a truly free society individuals would be free to live conservatively. Far more important: They would be free to live conservatively in groups. We call these groups “communities.” That means in a free society some communities would be free to establish rules that other people would find too constraining. What breaks my heart about Draper’s essay is that it buys into Obama’s view of society: Individuals versus the state. Bollocks. In such a denuded society the federal government will inexorably take charge of things it has no business taking charge of. Too many liberals and libertarians share the view that the government in Washington is the only government in the game. I agree entirely with libertarians that the feds shouldn’t be in the business of telling anybody how to live. But local communities should have enormous — though not unlimited — latitude to organize around principles that some libertarians, conservatives, and liberals don’t like.
• Another point (which I’ve made 8 trillion times). Liberals aren’t libertarian about social issues! Libertarians don’t believe in speech codes. They don’t believe in racial quotas. They don’t believe in cigarette bans. They don’t believe private citizens should be forced to do business with people they don’t want to do business with. They don’t believe in socialized medicine or limits on soda sizes. I have contempt for both liberals who claim they are libertarians and for libertarians who find common cause with liberals who refuse to acknowledge this fact. Claiming to be socially liberal but fiscally conservative is one of the great dodges in American politics. But it pales in comparison to claiming that you’re socially libertarian when you’re in fact socially authoritarian.
• One last point. Let’s assume that Draper is right. This is the libertarians’ moment. Well, I’ve got bad news for my libertarian friends. That moment will last exactly as long as, and no longer than, it takes for libertarians to actually take power. The instant there is a libertarian president or a libertarian majority in Congress, liberals will immediately and passionately denounce libertarianism as evil, cruel, sexist, and racist. This is the story of progressivism and it will never change. Any non-progressive movement that gains power becomes The Enemy. If Rand Paul is the nominee, I guarantee you people will look back on Draper’s piece as a set up. Liberals do this all the time. They designate out-of-power factions as the good conservatives or good right-wingers, because that makes them sound open-minded (“I don’t hate all conservatives, just the ones in charge.”). But then once they have a chance of seeing their ideas implemented, the fearmongering begins. If Rand Paul’s the nominee, the New York Times will be bludgeoning us with bones from his father’s closet until Paul is a Klansman. . . . when Nixon and Bush were president, liberals shrieked “Fascism!” Liberal nostalgia for Reagan or Goldwater is remarkably hard to reconcile with the way liberals treated Reagan and Goldwater when they were in power.
• Progressivism, stripped of its philosophical flare is ultimately and irreducibly about power. Any idea, movement, or politician that threatens the power of progressives and the(ir) administrative state will be cast as the greatest evil in the land. Libertarians who think otherwise are betraying their own anti-utopian creed.
