By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, May 10,
2024
Who were the libertarians? Now—when the movement
has reached its nadir—seems like a good time to consider the question.
I recently received an email from an old friend, an
esteemed academic who is foundering miserably in retirement and senescence.
Like many men of his kind, he has taken up politics with a social-media-driven
religious devotion and, having tried Donald Trump on for size for a few years,
has undergone a conversion to the cause of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, like
Donald Trump, has vermin on
the brain.
Kennedy is, of course, a charlatan and a huckster, but
more to the point here is that he is a left-wing charlatan and huckster—a man
with a view of government and national life that is something akin to that of
Sen. Bernie Sanders or an old-fashioned campus Marxist. My old friend is—not was,
but is—a doctrinaire libertarian, one of those gentlemen I could go to
and commiserate about what a terrible idea the Interstate Highway System was
and why we don’t really need an FDA. Oh, sure, Bobby is all wrong about the
economics and most everything else, he’ll say, but—and I’ll bet you
know where this is going—he got it right about COVID-19 and the vaccines.
Donald Trump, he’ll tell you, went along with the worst abuse of American civil
liberties since Abraham Lincoln illegally suspended habeas corpus,
practically turning these United States into a medical gulag.
Some people would like to forget the COVID era. Some
people still can think of little else. The pandemic really was a radicalizing
experience for a large number of Americans.
There has, in fact, been a cascade of radicalizing
experiences since the end of the 20th century: the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the
2007-08 financial crisis and subsequent bank bailouts, and the COVID-19
lockdowns and vaccine controversies chief among them. These events have had
parallel, but unequal, effects on the right and the left.
September 11 in many ways brought Fox News to life and
gave rise to a new kind of Republican tendency that psychologically conflated
national-security projects abroad with culture-war projects at home—as in the matter of the
Islamic Cultural Center on Park Place in Lower Manhattan—while on the left the
attack gave rise to an illiterately conspiratorial account of politics (Bush
knew! Halliburton!) and a reinvigorated connection with 1960s-style radicalism
as the movement protesting the Iraq War looked back to its Vietnam-era
precedent. The financial crisis gave rise to the Tea Party movement and its
progressive doppelgänger, Occupy Wall Street. The pandemic saw the right
adopt a conspiratorial view of vaccines and pharmaceutical companies that once
had been mainly a left-wing tendency while the left embraced a Kulturkampf approach
toward symbolic public-health measures such as masking and deepened its
fondness for expert authoritarianism.
Over the past two decades, the right adopted a more
libertarian critique of many institutions and practices and then rallied behind
an autocratic would-be caudillo with a distinctly etatist approach to
economic policy. The left, meanwhile, has adopted a more radically egalitarian
rhetoric even as the Democratic Party got very comfortable with its new role as
the party of moneyed professionals and urban elites. Strange times,
indeed.
One can see, without much difficulty or strain on the
moral imagination, how each of those events would have a radicalizing effect on
a certain kind of person. But one can also see that there is a certain kind of
person—largely, but not exclusively, Americans—looking for an excuse to become
radicalized. Tucker Carlson is one such example, but so is Nigel Farage, those angry
Dutch farmers, the people (some of the people) who elected Giorgia
Meloni and Javier
Milei, etc. The desire to be radicalized is fundamentally
a way to emotionally accommodate social alienation. It is the price that has to
be paid to indulge hatred.
That distinctive, of-the-moment alienation is,
ironically, what we feel when we are all stuck too close together. The modern
world is too close and too intimate, and it is, for that reason, full of people
who hate their neighbors and require a respectable reason for hating them—which
is why everybody says the people on the other side of whatever issue it is that
they are pretending to care about are Nazis. That’s the great lesson the Indiana
Jones movies taught us: There isn’t anything socially safer than
cheering against Nazis, even if you have to find them where there are
none.
It is easier to see how this works if you take it out of
your own national context. Can you imagine that there were perfectly good
reasons for some British people to wish to reestablish their own democratically
controlled national sovereignty over British affairs without being
superintended by the European Union? Can you imagine that there were other
Britons who had perfectly respectable reasons to want to maintain the benefits
and privileges associated with living in an EU country? My own sympathies were
with the Brexiteers, but there is much that is attractive about being a member
of the European Union, and it is not difficult to see why many British people
would have preferred to remain so.
There are many Americans who have enough sympathetic
imagination to do that, but fewer who can view both sides of the various
COVID-19 controversies with similar equanimity. I find myself pulled in
different ways, as usual. The anti-vaccine activists are dangerous cranks, and
the people who compare the COVID-19 shutdowns to the Soviet gulag are not to be
trusted. At the same time, I recently had an appointment with a medical
professional who insisted on wearing a mask for the entirety of our conversation—which
happened over Zoom, with each of us in otherwise empty rooms.
Of course I wanted to strangle him a little bit—who
wouldn’t?
COVID-19 radicalization is something one would expect to
see more of among people who already had libertarian inclinations, which
includes both the self-conscious libertarians with their Hayek books tucked
under their arms and the more traditional “You’re not the boss of me!” American
types. The weird thing is that COVID-19 radicalization has made so many of
these libertarians less libertarian rather than more so. They haven’t
moved from Free to Choose to The Machinery of Freedom, from
Milton Friedman to David Friedman, from Ayn Rand fantasies to
anarcho-capitalist fantasies. No, they’ve moved from Reason to Breitbart
to Mother Jones circa 1985, keeping the radical urgency but giving up on
the part of libertarianism oriented toward—what was it, again?—liberty.
Part of this is our aging population: We have all seen
relatives lose their minds to Fox News brain (which is a close relative of
Facebook brain and Washington Post comments-section brain). In 1920, only 1 in 20 Americans was 65
or older, while today
the figure is 1 in 6. And as our population gets older, our politics is
going to get dumber and crazier and crankier and more disconnected from
everyday reality.
Maybe I should not be very surprised.
We used to joke that libertarianism was for Republicans
who liked weed and porn, or that it is what you get when you slip 5,000
micrograms of LSD into the punch bowl at the Chamber of Commerce. Less
jokingly, we would observe that “libertarian” was an adjective preferred by
conservatives who were understandably embarrassed to be associated with the
Republican Party. (My first presidential vote was for Andre Marrou of the
Libertarian Party over incumbent George H.W. Bush, possibly the most sensible
president of my lifetime. But there were reasons to be embarrassed by
Republicans even back in the golden days of 1992.) To be a small-l libertarian
(as opposed to an activist in the Libertarian Party) was to liberate oneself
from having very much dumb political stuff to defend for the sake of party
solidarity. And the libertarians had (and have) most of the good ideas, as much
as I can appreciate Ramesh Ponnuru’s wise line about libertarianism being the
perfect political philosophy provided you live in a world with no foreign
policy or children. But perhaps the libertarians did not take those libertarian
ideas as seriously as I had thought they did.
It may be that libertarianism simply was what was
politically and socially available for the would-be right-wing radical from
(approximately) the 1970s through the turn of the century. If you were
right-ish leaning and had a hankering for something radical-feeling, then
libertarianism was where it was at. Surely there is something to that. And here
it is probably worth bearing in mind that many important and embarrassing links
between the mainstream conservative movement and fringe, conspiracy-minded, and
antisemitic movements were championed by erstwhile libertarians: Murray
Rothbard and his daft
effort to recruit David Duke and the radical left into a unified front
against the “welfare-warfare state”; Ron Paul and his
bigoted newsletters; Sam Francis and his long journey (but not as long as
one might have thought or hoped) from the Heritage Foundation and the Mises
Institute to the crackpot-racist
lecture circuit.
Maybe libertarianism never was a school of political
thought at all.
Schools of political thought are the work of many hands.
Political auteurs—sui generis great-man figures—tend to be dictators
such as Napoleon Bonaparte or Henry VIII. Politics that take any account of
consensus or pluralism tends to be by nature based on coalition-building, and
coalition-building politics, in turn, tend toward consensus and pluralism, at
least in many cases and to some degree. (Which isn’t to say that collective
leadership is a guarantee of decent policy: The Soviet Union was already a
brutal mess before Joseph Stalin got hold of it.)
Schools of political thought may be the product of a kind
of apostolic succession (Socrates begets Plato, Plato begets Aristotle) or, in
a more practical configuration, coalitions of contemporaries—aligned if not
necessarily unanimous—such as the American founders or the leaders of the
French Revolution. American conservatives—I mean intellectuals in movement
conservatism, not Republican-leaning voters at large—long thought of themselves
as being more like the philosophers in succession (National Review still
calls its seminar program “From Burke to Buckley,” Edmund Burke and William F.
Buckley Jr. being two points defining a line from which Trump-era conservatism,
such as it is, departs at a 45-degree angle) and less like members of a
political party. Conservatives thought that conservatism meant adherence to a
philosophy (or an ideology, if you aren’t allergic to the word) rather than
loyalty to a coalition.
But as it has turned out, coalitional loyalty—as
expressed through prone self-abasement in the Donald Trump cult—is the defining
characteristic of politically engaged conservatism in our time. Funny how that
worked out.
Many conservatives, including a few leading
neoconservatives, could never quite come around to the Republican Party even in
its pre-Trump incarnation, and a great many held the GOP at arm’s length. The
libertarians had even less to defend in the way of party apparatus: Either they
were a small minority tendency within the Republican Party and the wider
conservative movement or they were big fish in the minuscule pond that is the
Libertarian Party. (David Koch was each of those things at different points in his
career.) The libertarians were free to be thinkers rather than party men, café
philosophes rather than street-fighting sans-culottes. And that was
fine—provided you didn’t feel some deep and abiding need to be relevant.
Radicalism for the sake of radicalism is, of course, the
dead opposite of conservatism.
Without going too far into the factional Kremlinology of
the American right, the prefix “paleo” is useful here: Take the
paleo-libertarians and the paleo-conservatives back far enough and you are
mostly talking about the same people, a motley collection of Taft-ites and
Southern agrarians, anti-New Dealers and premature anti-New Dealers, America
First-ers, Lindbergh-ites, et al., with Albert Jay Nock representing the better
sort and H.L. Mencken and the American Mercury crew the
inferior sort. That conjunction gave rise to a style of political rhetoric that
was very, very good at providing a little pleasurable frisson to the Chamber of
Commerce men. It gave rise to more than that, of course, but that seems to be
the part that remains most attractive. It goes nicely with three fingers of
16-year-old Macallan.
The economist Tyler Cowen writes
about “mood affiliation,” which he defines as a logical fallacy in
which “people are first choosing a mood or attitude, and then finding the
disparate views which match to that mood and, to themselves, justifying those
views by the mood.” An example from Cowen: “People who see a lot of net
environmental progress (air and water are cleaner, for instance) and thus
dismiss or downgrade well-grounded accounts of particular environmental
problems. There’s simply an urgent feeling that any ‘pessimistic’ view needs to
be countered.” In our catastrophizing time, the urge to counter pessimism is
much weaker than the urge to counter optimism. It is remarkable how
easily people move from one issue to another, from one position to another,
from one school of political thought to another, without ever changing in the
slightest the underlying emotional scaffolding of their politics.
The most obvious example of that used to be the Cold
War-era left and U.S. foreign policy: It didn’t matter what happened, what the
issue was, or what the outcome was, as long as you told a story in which the
United States ultimately was the villain. Many progressives took a similar
attitude toward business: If Americans eat too much sugar, take too many
opioids, or take out loans they can never possibly hope to repay, it must be
the fault of Big Business, somehow.
On the right, you can see the same thing when it comes to
illegal immigrants: Medicare would be fine without the illegals, Social
Security would be fine without the illegals, the schools would be fine without
the illegals, housing wouldn’t be a problem if not for the illegals, etc. (“I didn’t get a ‘harrumph’
out of that guy!”) Today, the thing that really matters for a certain kind
of libertarian-ish crank is that government at many levels was excessively
risk-averse and heavy-handed during a worldwide viral epidemic a few years ago.
There were things to be learned from the successes and failures of the COVID-19
era. We managed not to learn much—even with all that time on our hands.
And what we have learned is that Grandpa probably needs
some real-life friends who can gently tell him how crazy he sounds when he
starts going on about Bobby Kennedy and the vaccines. And maybe to forgo that
third glass of wine with dinner and to switch off Fox News from time to time.
Writing a vicious obituary of libertarian crank Murray Rothbard not very long
after the infamous events in Waco, Texas, William F. Buckley was acid:
“Yes, Murray Rothbard believed in freedom. And, yes, David Koresh believed in
God.” True. But what they both really believed in was believing,
that beliefs per se could transform a life and give it meaning.
Does belief transform lives? Does it save them? If you
are talking about the career of Jesus of Nazareth, then, yes; if you are
talking about the career of Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health,
then, no. I know a few people who still take Osho (the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)
very, very seriously. Osho bought a fleet of Rolls Royces with this sort of
thing:
The whole of life is dialectical.
The logos is dialectical and reason is a process of the same. You can think of
it in these terms. Dialectics is heterosexual; reason, rationality, is
homosexual. Rationality is homosexual. That’s why homosexuality is growing in
the West because the West has accepted Aristotle, reason. Heraclitus is
heterosexual. He will include the opposite. If you listen to reason you will be
homosexual.
Osho, it bears noting, was not anti-homosexuality, in
spite of what you might think from the above. He described homosexuality as
“pure fun,” an alternative to “dangerous” heterosexuality; his ideal man was a
kind of enlightened sensualist he named “Zorba the Buddha.” Is that sillier
than Ayn Rand? More meretricious than Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? It isn’t obvious
to me that it is. It is the kind of thing that pushes the same buttons and
scratches the same itch, albeit for people with a different sensibility
and ethos. (Zorba the Buddha is also the name of a very good
vegetarian restaurant run by Osho cultists around the corner from the Taj
Mahal.)
If you think I have wandered too far afield here, I
haven’t: The point is that it isn’t the doctrine that matters to Americans—it
is how reciting the tenets of the doctrine makes them feel. That is why
sentimental Evangelical megachurches succeed where all the enlightened
scholarly Catholics and upright rigorous Calvinists and others of that ilk
fail—in marketing, I mean, not in theology. That is why people who are
committed free-market men on Monday morning are Trumpist industry-policy men on
Wednesday afternoon and howling at the moon with Bobby Kennedy on Friday
night.
It is not the case that if you look long
into the abyss of American political idealism that the abyss looks into
you—there is nothing there to look back, because there is nothing there to see.
Only chaos. Typewriters may be a thing of the past, but we still have Facebook
and Elon Musk’s depraved X thing, and here we are, the infinite monkeys trying
to work out the Declaration of Independence or Democracy in America or
maybe at least a brief poetical account of the life and times and peculiar
habits of an old man from Nantucket. Infinite monkeys, monkeying infinitely.
The plague has come and gone, and all we remember is
how inconvenient it all was, how it made us feel small and
put-upon and bullied. And the people who felt that way weren’t always wrong to
feel that way. It just doesn’t matter as much as they think it does. Good
stoical republicans don’t worry too much about that sort of thing, don’t drive
themselves bonkers obsessive about about what it all means. Others, lacking the
benefit of philosophy, require some fixed point in the universe to orient
themselves, and that point invariably takes the form of a man. Bobby Kennedy is
a damned peculiar choice for an idol, but these are damned peculiar times, and
strange things are afoot at the Chamber of Commerce.
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