What libertarianism has in common with Marxism

I have observed before that the difference between libertarians and traditional conservatives lies in the fact that libertarians see freedom as an end in itself, whereas conservatives see freedom as the means to the end of the common good.

This is, by the way, why libertarianism militates toward pure democracy, something the founding fathers eschewed, while traditional conservatism naturally inclines toward republican forms of government like that of the United States. In this sense, libertarians are at odds with, rather than inclined toward American constitutionalism.

As Aristotle points out in his Politics, each form of government has its unique aim. The aim of democracy is freedom. Republican forms of government, on the other hand, contain mixed aims, since a republic is a hybrid form of government.

This is why I think you will see (as we already have) so-called "libertarian conservatives" supporting Internet voting and multi-day elections and other means of "democratizing" the election process. And the next time the electoral college becomes an issue, just watch libertarians—who talk a good game on the Constitution, but don't seem to know much about why it was written the way it was written—line up in support of changes to make it a purely popular election irrespective of the role of the states.

The founders put all kinds of complicating factors into the system to balance it and keep it stable and to protect it from the destabilizing forces of pure democracy.

In any case, since libertarians have largely appropriated the "conservative" label these days, it is probably useful also to point out one way in which libertarianism is similar to Marxism.

Under Marx's "materialist dialectic," it is material factors that determine socio-political realities through socio-economic factors. In this sense Marxism is all about economics. Economics determine everything.

Under traditionalist conservatism, non-materialist values have played at least as much, perhaps a larger role in the well-being of a society. This is why values issues have always loomed large in conservative political rhetoric—always, until recent years.

For traditionalist conservatives, values matter, because they shape events more than material factors. But if you listen carefully to libertarian rhetoric, which now focuses almost exclusively on pocketbook issues, you will detect the implicit assumption that values don't matter (unless they are "market values," whatever that means). In fact, many so-called "moderate" Republicans say this outright: politics is exclusively about material issues.

This is why libertarianism can be referred to simply as the "materialist right." It is the materialist right that, unlike traditionalist conservatism, has given up on the culture.

Now as you listen to the campaign leading up to this next election, note the almost complete dependence of Republican rhetoric on economics—even among candidates who are ostensibly traditionalist conservatives.

This is also why, by the way, the Republicans will lose again—because they have given up on the heart issues. Voters vote their hearts, not their pocket books. That is why Reagan won—and Obama (It's also why Obama won re-election—right in the teeth of an economic crisis).

Just watch it happen again.

No, You're Not Like Ronald Reagan: Why most "conservative" leaders need to stop comparing themselves to the Gipper

I recently ran in to an old acquaintance and we got to talking politics. During the course of the conversation, I expressed disagreement with some policy position he had, which he said he believed in because he was a "conservative libertarian."

I winced at the historically oxymoronic expression, and thought of similar linguistic formulations, such as "square circle." I informed him that I was a traditional conservative in the mold of Russell Kirk.

"Who's that?" he said.

At this point, I made a mental note to write a blog post on old acquaintances I run into who think they are conservatives but who really aren't.

To say you are a conservative who doesn't know who Russell Kirk is is like claiming to be a baseball fan and never having heard of Babe Ruth, or a scientist who's doesn't know who Einstein was.

Let me state this plainly: If you think you are a mature conservative but you do not know who Russell Kirk is—or Edmund Burke or T. S. Eliot, then you are mistaken. You are not a conservative and you might as well face the fact. Look in the mirror. Admit it to yourself. This is the only way healing can begin.

Take off your Republican campaign buttons, put down your ghost written Sean Hannity book, stifle the delusion that Sarah Palin is the second coming of Margaret Thatcher (or for that matter whose name even belongs in the same sentence) and sit down for a minute. Use the pages from the Hannity book as cage lining for your parakeet—unless your parakeet has intellectual scruples that prevent him from deigning even to poop on them, in which case you should just throw them out.

And try to extricate from your mind the belief that culture doesn't matter and that an economic policy suffices for a political position, through surgical means if necessary.

For the benefit of the conservatively illiterate, Kirk was the author of the The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot, as well as the best modern statement of traditional conservative belief ever written: The Politics of Prudence. Michael Aeschliman called him "the most substantial American conservative man of letters of the last 75 years."

When you have finished reading these, read every other book Kirk ever wrote, especially The Roots of American Order (and if you can't handle that, then the short version of Roots, a book called The American Cause). In fact, there is a good introduction at National Review's website: "The Moral Imagination of Russell Kirk," by Michael Aeschliman.

And after that, sit down with an honest glass of bourbon (or, if you are Islamic—the only historically valid reason to be a teetotaler, a glass of water) and begin reading Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution. Spend a whole year on it. At least.

Burke, for those who don't know, almost single-handedly faced down the corrosive and malignant rationalist secularism of the French Revolution, saving England from its worst effects. Would that we had a Burke now to face down the malignant Cultural Revolution of our own time.

Libertarianism is not only not conservatism, it doesn't even amount to a political philosophy. It is, instead, an ideology, a true modern "ism." Like every other illicit modern world view, it takes one part of the truth (in this case, the free market), isolates it from all other truths, and demands that every other part subordinate itself to that one.

We should admire the free market, but we should beware the reductionist ideology that has been constructed in its name.

Which brings me to Ronald Reagan.

Despite all the libertarians and neoconservatives who claim the Reagan mantle, Reagan knew who Russell Kirk was, conferring on him the Presidential Citizens Medal in 1989. Reagan cut his teeth on the old National Review magazine, run by William F. Buckley, who, although he went through the Libertarian Temptation in his later years (something Kirk allegedly saw coming), was for the most part a Russell Kirk conservative.

Before about 1988, no functionally literate conservative would have said "Who's that?" when Russell Kirk's name was mentioned.

The old National Review made Ronald Reagan (and Reagan, as I recall, actually says that somewhere), and Russell Kirk helped make National Review.

The fashionable conservative leaders fleeing the cultural battlements on issue after social issue with their tails between their legs and invoking the name of Ronald Reagan as they do so should be pelted with rotten vegetables at every available opportunity. Reagan would never have done this.

On the great moral issue of late 20th century—abortion—Reagan never backed down. In fact, I think he brought it up in every State of the Union address. The liberal control of the media at the time (this was before conservatives took over talk radio) was universal. It didn't matter, Reagan never gave up.

I can't imagine what he would have said if he had known how so-called conservative leaders would surrender so easily in the fight for traditional marriage.

There needs to be some conservative agency that monitors false claims to Reaganism. It would be a full time job.

A critique of the patron saint of libertarianism

John Stuart Mill is the patron saint of libertarianism (a word Americans use for what Europeans more correctly--and historically--refer to as simply "liberalism"). Mill's Enlightenment rationalist view of freedom has exercised a mischievous influence of American political thought.

The always excellent Imaginative Conservative has an excellent critique of Mill:

As long as there have been “libertarians,” there has been hero worship of John Stuart Mill. This Nineteenth Century utilitarian author, most famously of On Liberty, has been looked to as a kind of fount of holy writ for individualism. And Mill was an individualist. Unfortunately, he was not a supporter of liberty in any meaningful sense.

It is somewhat odd, frankly, that Mill should enjoy the reputation he does, given the depth and breadth of the written record of his opinions and proposals advocating an administrative state with unchecked power to regulate people’s daily lives. What is more, excellent studies by Joseph Hamburger and, more recently, Linda Raeder, have shown the character and statist intentions of his life’s work. Still, some of the many passages so frequently quoted from his works might give evidence, to those who do not read more and with moderate care, that he was a friend to individual freedom and reasoned, principled service to mankind ...

Read more here.

Why libertarianism is not conservatism

Thomas Hobbes

It's not hard to imagine why it is that more and more conservatives are converting over to libertarianism.

For one thing, it's a whole lot easier to be a libertarian. Like every other ideology, libertarianism dispenses with all other principles than one. It eliminates the need to think about anything other than the one political doctrine. In many ways, it's the path of least resistance.

Libertarians are the political world's One-Note Johnnys: Johnny can only sing one note/And the note is this: freedom of choice.

Freedom of choice has the political advantage of being a procedural belief. It is mechanical rather than organic. It is a political and social mechanism into which you can put a substantive belief on one end, and automatically get a specific policy prescription out the other. In this respect it is in complete alignment with the scientistic spirit of our time.

Classical conservative political philosophy requires thought and wisdom, but libertarianism, as a fully Hobbesian position, involves no real substantive thought at all, only a political calculation.

This position has gotten popular recently because by lopping off any substantive principles addressing the common good (such as those concerning marriage and the family) from their body of belief, they are absolved from having to engage in the difficult job of defending these essential institutions. Freedom of individual choice alone is insufficient as a basis for their defense and from this perspective marriage and the traditional family can be thrown to the political wolves with perfect political consistency and in seeming good conscience.

It also dispenses with the need for any intellectual heavy lifting.

Libertarianism cannot be considered a conservative political philosophy. A conservative political philosophy cannot be reduced to one axiom, to which all other considerations are subordinate.

Reductionist in its essence, libertarianism is an ideology, not a philosophy. In this respect, it is closer to American liberal socialism than to conservatism. In socialism's case, the one exclusive note is social justice (or, rather, their version of it) and to that one note the rest of their song must submit.

Libertarians are stillborn conservatives―as are socialists. This is what Allan Bloom meant when, in The Closing of the American Mind, he referred to "right-wing liberals" and "left-wing liberals." Libertarians are not conservatives at all: They are right wing liberals.

Libertarianism differs from conservatism in that it considers the freedom of the atomistic individual as an end; whereas conservatism considers freedom a means to the end of the common good. Libertarianism is John Locke for the non-thinker; it is Thomas Hobbes for Dummies.

The other means by which the common good is brought about include, among other things:

• a belief in an permanent and perennial moral order that transcends the individual;
• that tradition and custom are better indicators what is and what should be because they reflect the wisdom and knowledge of men over time and cultures rather than the narrow perspective of those who happen to be living now;
• that political solutions require long-term thinking, not just a surrender to the individual whims of the hour;
• that what works in one time and one place may not be the best thing in another time and another place;
• that man is morally flawed and therefore Utopia is impossible;
• that economic freedom presumes the respect for private property;
• and that a properly operating society requires more than just the government and the atomistic individual, but also voluntary associations like the family, the church, and the civic group

These are, of course, restatements of Russell Kirk, the father of the modern conservative movement. But the Russell Kirks of conservatism have disappeared or fallen silent in the United States, and their place has been taken by the libertarian ideologues.

But libertarianism is an universal political solvent that will eventually destroy itself, largely because to justify itself it cannot depend on a calculus. It must have a substantive reason to ground its belief that the interest of the atomistic individual is supreme, but it cannot supply it.

Separating the conservative men from the libertarian boys on the marriage issue

The rate at which conservative leaders are abandoning their principles on the marriage issue is astounding—and instructive. David Frum, Karl Rove, Sen. Rob Portman—the list goes on. In politics, as in physiology, there is clotting mechanism that eventually slows such things, but there is definitely a realignment in progress, and this realignment is separating the conservative men from the libertarian boys.

It is hard to determine how many of these people are really abandoning their principles and how many of them never really held the principles they claimed to hold in the first place. It may sound uncharitable to limit the possibilities to only these two, but it is hard to justify any other explanation.

The timing alone is evidence for the charge of political opportunism. When someone changes his  mind on an issue when it is not popular to do so, we are much more likely to believe that it was a real change of heart. But when it is done at a time that makes it the politically convenient thing to do, we should be suspicious.

To defect to the other side in battle when the battle is going your way may indicate that you really think that you are on the wrong side. But to do it when the enemy is winning on all fronts is prima facie evidence of lack of original commitment--if not sheer cowardice. We'll go with the former. 

Remember, we're trying to be charitable.

George Washington is said to have been disgusted at the lack of fortitude of his troops early in the Revolutionary War because of their penchant for fleeing at the least hint of opposition. The conservative movement is now having the opposite problem: Right now conservative troops are being trampled by their own officers who, having abandoned their posts in the culture war, are running as fast as they can from the front.

When it comes to the Roves of the movement, it seems pretty clear that they never held any other principles than political opportunism.

In the case of the Frums, we are looking at people who have principles, just not the ones they once pretended to have. There was little to prevent them from turning tail and running in the first place. They are libertarians. They're just reverting to ideological equilibrium. They are like conscript troops from conquered territory: Once the balance of power shifts back the other way, their native loyalties reassert themselves--the aggravating factor, of course, being that the Roves and Frums were not conscripts: They were volunteers.

They were never conservatives to begin with. And it would have been nice to know before the shooting started.

Rand Paul and what's wrong with libertarianism

Whether you think they are good in themselves or not, there are some events which become teaching moments. Rand Paul's candidacy is surely one of them. His candidacy is an opportunity to make a clearer distinction between libertarianism and traditional conservatism.

I have said before that libertarianism is conservatism without a soul. But this definition is a little too general (and certainly too cheeky) to be useful. Here is, I think, the central problem with libertarianism and what makes it different than traditional conservatism: libertarianism sees freedom as an end rather than a means.

For the libertarian, any restriction on freedom is, by nature a bad thing. This is why someone like Paul gets in trouble when sharing his thoughts on civil rights laws. Civil rights laws impinge on the freedom of business owners, no question about it. And if this is you're only criterion for judging the justice of a law, then this is how it will look to you.

However, if freedom is only a means, rather than an end, then you are not driven inevitably to this conclusion. To the traditionalist conservative, freedom is not an end, it is a means--a means to the end of the common good. Furthermore, it is only one of several means toward that end. If this is true, therefore, the worth of civil rights laws cannot solely be decided on the criterion of whether they interfere with the freedom of private business owners, but whether the benefits they have toward the common good outweigh the interference with that freedom. The libertarian's philosophy disallows him from even asking this question, since it introduces a criterion he doesn't even recognize.

This is the whole problem with the Tea Party Movement--and any other neoconservative movement: it doesn't recognize or understand the distinction between freedom as a means and freedom as an end.

The position of his critics, mostly liberals, however, is hardly any better. They have even less justification for supporting civil rights laws. If we are to take their criticism of abortion laws as an example--that they "impose morality"--then how can they justify the support of civil rights laws, which clearly impose morality? But there is much more to be said on this that I don't have time to say here.