Part II: Why I am a libertarian and not a conservative, especially in the era of neocon hegemony
(posted by Mona)
Below I set forth my position as a non-conservative, Hayekian libertarian with recourse to excerpts from Hayek’s own rejection of conservatism. I further pointed out via an interview with the former publisher of National Review, William Rusher, that during the Cold War era libertarians and conservatives co-existed in the GOP, in a “fusionism” that was always tense.
With the rise of neoconservative dominance in the Republican Party, that fusionism is crumbling, and those libertarians who are really Republicans first are now (angrily) separating from those who are not; I am one of the latter. For with neoconservatism’s having taken hold of the GOP, that party is wholly incompatible with any coherent version of libertarianism. As the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, himself celebrated in an August 2003 piece in The Weekly Standard, titled The Neoconsersavtive Persuasion, neocons “politely overlook” Dwight Eisenhower and Barry Goldwater, and he goes on to state, my emphasis in all quotes:
Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on “the road to serfdom.” Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his “The Man Versus the State,” was a historical eccentricity. People have always preferred strong government to weak government
[...]
The steady decline in our democratic culture, sinking to new levels of vulgarity, does unite neocons with traditional conservatives–though not with those libertarian conservatives who are conservative in economics but unmindful of the culture. The upshot is a quite unexpected alliance between neocons, who include a fair proportion of secular intellectuals, and religious traditionalists. They are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government’s attention. And since the Republican party now has a substantial base among the religious, this gives neocons a certain influence and even power.
So, the high priest of neoconservatism has officially disinvited libertarians and their principles from the Republican Party. (I accept.) Kristol continues:
With power come responsibilities, whether sought or not, whether welcome or not. And it is a fact that if you have the kind of [military power the U.S. has now] , either you will find opportunities to use it, or the world will discover them for you.
The older, traditional elements in the Republican party have difficulty coming to terms with this new reality in foreign affairs, just as they cannot reconcile economic conservatism with social and cultural conservatism. But by one of those accidents historians ponder, our current president and his administration turn out to be quite at home in this new political environment, although it is clear they did not anticipate this role any more than their party as a whole did. As a result, neoconservatism began enjoying a second life…
Kristol is correct that some “older” elements in the GOP do not hold that the state properly has a role to play in “regulating pornography and the like.” He is also right that libertarians know that war is the health of the state, and so are uninterested, to put it mildly, in seeking opportunities to use our military power; the military-industrial complex is a corruption of which free marketeers (as opposed to corporatists) do not approve.
Worse still, neoconservitves feel no compunction at all about lying to advance their agenda. Take the issue of evolution. In a 1997 article titled Origin of the Specious:Why do neoconservatives doubt Darwin? by Reason magazine’s Ronald Bailey, Bailey finds that Irving Kristol thinks denying evolution is a noble lie necessary for the culture. Bailey quotes Kristol thus:
Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to [Leo] Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. “What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that `the truth will make men free.’” Kristol adds that “Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some…minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences.”
Kristol agrees with this view. “There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people,” he says in an interview. “There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”
Setting aside the noxiousness of deciding that some facts must be held closely only by the elite, lying is, well, wrong. But Kristol’s views explain why Commentary publishes articles (as discussed in Bailey’s piece) attacking evolution, even though every writer there is too intelligent to believe such nonsense. But as Hayek noted and I quoted in my post below, denying facts — and Hayek specifically cited the issue of evolution — because one doesn’t like them, or one fears where they might lead, is unacceptable. For neocons, however, lying and denying facts are a feature, not a bug. (And they have lied with a zeal for all the Middle Eastern interventions they long for, but that’s another post.)
Thus, I cannot abide in a party where such statist, lying authoritarians hold hegemony. No libertarian should.
February 18th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
The problem with trusting an elite to decide which truths are “appropriate for children” is fairly obvious. It was pointed out by Lord Acton a long time ago. Deciding what other people should be allowed to know involves a considerable amount of power; and it’s likely in practice to involve shaping popular consciousness so as to protect the interests of those in power.
Bryan Caplan’s argument in The Myth of the Rational Voter is liable to the same objection. It assumes the possibility of disinterested expertise that isn’t corrupted by power interests. If professional economists really were erected into a Platonic Guardian caste, their version of “free markets” and “free trade” would probably look one hell of a lot like that of the neoliberal corporate pimps who gave us NAFTA and the Uruguay Round of GATT. It would be the kind of corporatist, mercantilist “free market economics” promoted by Tom Friedman.
February 18th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Kevin: I ask this neither rhetorically nor critically, but sincerely. What are your objections to NAFTA?
March 6th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Mona,
I don’t want to speak for Kevin, but this link might give you some indication of his views:
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/search?q=NAFTA
A somewhat less contextual argument against it would involve comparing it to the Constitution of the U.S. It was originally essentially a free-trade agreement amongst the several states, with a few limited extra powers thrown in. Has it stayed as merely a free-trade agreement?
NAFTA similarly creates supra-national governing boards in the name of free trade. Shouldn’t we at least worry whether they will follow the same path as the U.S. federal government?
It’s one thing to be pro-”free trade” and quite another to be pro-NAFTA.
BTW, congrats on your new gig.