Libertarianism

There's no doubting the energy in the tea bagger movement. The spittle practically flies at you right out of the TV screen.

There have been some interesting articles on the tea baggers lately. One of the most interesting is Mark Lilla's in The New York Review of Books: "The Tea Party Jacobins":

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.

Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.

I can't so easily dismiss everything that these "Jacobins" have to say, though. Among my concerns are indeed:

• The increasing power of the government.
• The increasing budget of the government.
• The increasing deficit of the government.
• The apparent erosion of civil rights.

No doubt your average tea bagger would define these concerns a bit differently than I do. But there's a bit of common ground there. And I'd say most progressives share these concerns. It's been a regular refrain in the progressive blogosphere for years.

But the tea baggers come with baggage — offensive, hateful baggage that I simply can't endorse, or even stomach:

• The anti-immigrant cant that smacks of racism and xenophobia and fear.
• The anti-gay rage that burns with homophobia and fear.
• The anti-women's health attitudes that crackle with misogyny and chauvinism and fear.
• The hysterical, amped up propagandizing, with liberal use of "fascist" and "socialist," often in the same sentence that drips with fear.
• And the utter stupidity that wails about fantasy nightmares like "the government taking over Medicare" (which, for you who were left behind, is a government program).

So where's the party for those of us who are fiscally on the conservative side and socially on the live-and-let-live side? Obviously the Republicans have been on a government-regulating-private-lives bent for decades now, so they're out. And the Democrats … well … when they aren't selling out to right-wing interests, they're coming up with big projects like this was 1965.

I feel like I've had no party my entire voting life. The Republicans have been hyenas barking at everyone to get in line, and the Democrats have been gazelles, running away, always striving for style points.

In the olden days, there was a real debate between Democrats and Republicans. It seems like it was more principled, more about ideas than about strutting around, claiming to be "the real Americans." And there certainly was less brazen selling out to lobbyists.

There was a time when Republicans were led by people like Barry Goldwater, who had what today would be considered "radical" ideas about small government: that "the government should stay out of people's private lives," and that included homosexuality and abortion. He even supported gays in the military.

It's a wonder the tea baggers aren't burning him in effigy.

Imagine a Goldwater kind of Republican Party opposing the Democrats. I wouldn't agree with them on a lot of things, but at least it's philosophically consistent, and would be a good counterbalance to the Democrats. As it is, I find myself rooting for the Dems not so much because I support what they're doing up and down the line — far from it — but rather because I find the Republican opposition so unprincipled, so spiteful, so unpatriotic and so incredibly stupid that it doesn't just turn me off, it frightens me.

It's almost like George W. Bush was a restraining influence, and now the wingnuts are really cutting loose.

No, if you're a fiscal moderate with leave-people-alone views on private life, like I am, you know that, when it comes down to it, we have no party to represent us. We just support the party that works against us the least. Resigned. Disgusted. Seeing the appeal of embracing cynical distance from it all, because actually doing something sensible seems so out of reach of our government these days.

And meanwhile the tea baggers mock us with their lurid, tragi-comic mockery of what this country really needs.

So now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to wrap up this little rant, pour myself a drink, and watch some TV like a good citizen.

The party of Barry Goldwater is dead.

Via Captain's Quarters:

It's their community, of course, and they set the rules. However, this doesn't hurt Paul's credibility as much as it does Redstate's. While Paul's supporters tend towards the annoying and repetitive, they have less impact because we can easily engage them and counter their arguments. Banning them simply for their support for a candidate seems more like an admission that Redstate lacks that ability.

I'm no Paul supporter by any means. However, Paul's statements can be addressed and rebutted fairly easily, at least those with which I strongly disagree. I don't fear the commenters nor the debate, even if it does grow tiresome at times. It certainly can't be any more tiresome than the S-CHIP debate, or the Iraq War debate, or the FISA debate -- and I'd have less sympathy for opponents on those issues than the people who support Ron Paul.

Having been to the CLC, I disagree with Leon's assumption that these Paul supporters are all or mostly cryptoliberals. Plenty of libertarian-leaning Republicans exist in the party, along with the former Buchananites and isolationists of the GOP. Instead of cutting these people off, it might be better for Redstate to keep engaging them.

Yes, the small-government advocates should be tolerated in the party of neo-fascism. Dismiss their arguments for fiscal responsibility.

Even though Ron Paul is a social conservative, as ready to invite Big Brother into the livingrooms and bedrooms of Americans as any gold-star Republican, his name is mud in mainstream Republican circles.

Why?

Maybe follow the money. This is the new face of conservatism.

(P.S. - I'm not a Ron Paul supporter, either. Far be it! But compared to all the other Republican candidates, he's a fucking saint!)

The American Conservative offers up some interesting observations in two articles about libertarianism.

In Marxism of the Right, Robert Locke observes that:

...libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function.

I think the Republicans would disagree, what with their attempt to dismantle Social Security and their successes at things like passing, at the behest of the banks and insurance companies, protectionist legislation that prevents ordinary citizens from declaring bankruptcy ... presumably because that would inconvenience the wealthy, who paid for the Republicans' campaigns.

The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon’s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.

Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. Nourishing foods are good for us by nature, not because we choose to eat them. Taken to its logical conclusion, the reduction of the good to the freely chosen means there are no inherently good or bad choices at all, but that a man who chose to spend his life playing tiddlywinks has lived as worthy a life as a Washington or a Churchill.

Furthermore, the reduction of all goods to individual choices presupposes that all goods are individual. But some, like national security, clean air, or a healthy culture, are inherently collective. It may be possible to privatize some, but only some, and the efforts can be comically inefficient. Do you really want to trace every pollutant in the air back to the factory that emitted it and sue?

It's thinking like this that will get you unceremoniously booted out of the GOP.

[L]ibertarianism has a naïve view of economics that seems to have stopped paying attention to the actual history of capitalism around 1880. There is not the space here to refute simplistic laissez faire, but note for now that the second-richest nation in the world, Japan, has one of the most regulated economies, while nations in which government has essentially lost control over economic life, like Russia, are hardly economic paradises. Legitimate criticism of over-regulation does not entail going to the opposite extreme.

Ah, but you miss the point, which is that the plutocrats are making a lot of money in Russia! Mass poverty and unemployment aren't supposed to count.

Joseph McCarthy strikes a different pose with In Defense of Freedom:

Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a complete system of ethics or metaphysics. Political philosophies address specifically the state and, more generally, justice in human society. The distinguishing characteristic of libertarianism is that it applies to the state the same ethical rules that apply to everyone else. Given that murder and theft are wrong—views not unique to libertarianism, of course—the libertarian contends that the state, which is to say those individuals who purport to act in the name of the common good, has no more right to seize the property of others, beat them, conscript them, or otherwise harm them than any other institution or individual has. Beyond this, libertarianism says only that a society without institutionalized violence can indeed exist and even thrive.

One might wonder, then, why libertarian Republicans (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) voted for the neo-fascist administration who has been, yes, seizing the property of others, beaten people and even tortured them, conscripted soldiers long since retired to go off and fight in a war justified by lies.

Any power that the state assumes typically comes to be seen in retrospect as absolutely essential. America long got by well without a Federal Reserve or a Food and Drug Administration, yet today it is almost unthinkable that they could be abolished.

Apparently this libertarian was raised by libertarians who did not believe in public education, or he would have learned that the FDA, a creation of Republican Teddy Roosevelt, was called into being after rising numbers of deaths and dire illnesses caused by unsafe medicines and unhealthful foods. (Then again, now the FDA seems to ensure that we have plenty of deaths and dire illnesses caused by unsafe medicines and unhealthful foods, so maybe he's right.)

Once, conservatives really did intend to repeal the New Deal. Now a Republican president talks about saving Social Security—albeit with a phony “privatization� plan—as if society would collapse in the absence of mandatory savings or government social insurance. Conservatives complain about the media’s erstwhile tendency to label Soviet hardliners as Russian “conservatives,� but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that if Communism were a government program, the Republican Party would be trying to save it, too.

I think they call that, "Go team!"

Economics is of some help here, showing both that government is not necessary for prosperity and that in fact state intervention into the free market hurts the very people it’s supposed to help. Rent control makes affordable apartments scarce....

...Or maybe rent control makes affordable apartments affordable, and their scarcity is because people need to be able to afford their housing -- especially if it's all going down the toilet in rent.

...The minimum wage exacerbates unemployment....

...Right, don't you wish your local McD's had 40 miserable people working for two bucks an hour rather than 20 miserable people working for 6? Them minimum wage jobs are just so hot that everyone's losing sleep over how to snap one up. I wonder if Mr. McCarthy thinks $11,500/year gross is comfy living.

And a basic law of economics is that you get more of what you subsidize: doles encourage unemployment.

...Hmm, I thought doles were so that the people who were already unemployed could eat. What should they do instead? Sell crack?

Social conservatives have long faced an apparent paradox. No matter how Christian the president and members of his party claim to be, no matter how many “solid� conservatives are elected Congress, the fabric of the social order continues to fray.

Yes, it continues to fray because certain people are wont to villainize entire sectors of the American people -- the evil homosexuals, the evil welfare mothers, the evil pregnant teenage girls, the evil AARP, the evil liberals, the evil reporters, the evil teachers, the evil academics, the evil Jews, the evil Hollywood producers, the evil cartoonists, the evil children's television programmers, the evil Arabs, the evil union workers, the evil non-union workers, the evil atheists, the evil government workers, the evil Vietnam veterans, the evil feminists, the evil French, the evil whatever....

Yeah, fabric tends to fray when you do your best to rip it to shreds.