Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right
(posted by Jim Henley)
Hello everyone. My name is Jim Henley and the brain trust here at AOTP has honored me with an invitation to guest-blog here for a bit. My home blog is Unqualified Offerings. If I have a claim to fame, which is doubtful, it is becoming pretty much the first “warblogger” after the atrocities of September 11, 2001 to represent the anti-interventionist tenets of libertarianism in what came to be called the blogosphere. Back then I thought of myself as a man of “the Right,” though not a “conservative,” and pitched my arguments against promiscuous war, untrammelled security prerogatives and nationalism in “right-wing” terms, trying to explain how militarism, hegemony and torture contravene libertarian and conservative principles of limited government, humility and prudence.
That didn’t go so well.
Over time I came to think of myself as a man of “the Left” broadly considered. You could say this was due to events, not just Iraq and Gitmo but Terri Schiavo and gay marriage and all the right-wing “nanny-statism” of Bush-era Republicanism making clear that libertarianism and “small-government conservatism” have even less purchase on the “Right” than I thought they did years ago, when I never thought they had much to start. You could say that changes in my personal life gave me different people to be annoyed with: when I first self-identified as a libertarian in the 1990s I was managing bookstores and hanging with poets. The inanity I was exposed to was “progressive” inanity. In the Naughts I’ve been a suburbanite with corporate middle-management jobs: now on those occasions when I run into assholes, they’re characteristically “conservative” in their annoyance. You could say it’s nothing more than readership capture: because my writing frequently criticized the Bush Administration because the Bush Administration is, after all, in power, over time most of my links came from liberal blogs and my most vocal readers skewed left.
(Readership capture is always an issue in blogging. A few years ago, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit would sometimes write something that risked straying off his particular reservation. In pretty much every case, it would sprout an “UPDATE” in the form of a piece of reader e-mail drawing him back in. Perhaps that still happens there.)
Regardless, I now assume a liberal/libertarian audience when I write, where six and even four years ago I assumed a conservative/libertarian one. And the Art of the Possible exists to see what use liberals and libertarians can be to each other at the present political moment, what we should be to each other.
The first thing to recognize is that, purely in political terms, this is not a meeting of equals. In terms of numbers, institutional infrastructure, organizational capacity and political energy, “libertarianism” hardly rises to the level of junior partner in any fusionism. This is true whether you define libertarianism narrowly or broadly.
The narrow cohort disdains reformism and compromise with aggression, and defines aggression as including core allegiances of modern liberalism like the progressive income tax and redistributive wealth transfers. Liberals and narrow-cohort libertarians are useless to each other and worse than useless: active enemies.
To the extent the broad cohort even exists it is divided against itself, which is how you end up with people as various as Jon Henke and me calling ourselves “libertarians.” And to the extent even the broad cohort has a coherent set of policy preferences, we usually gloss them as “economically conservative and socially liberal” - lower taxes and government spending; greater civil liberties; broad lifestyle-diversity tolerance. As people like Matthew Yglesias have pointed out, while the broad-cohort libertarians may indeed constitute about 10% of the electorate and thus a theoretical crucial swing vote, neither major US political party can give these voters everything they want without alienating their activist bases, and in practical terms the activist bases matter more: they are the people who get inspired enough to staff precincts, attend caucuses and otherwise make party machinery run. Let’s say five to ten percent of the electorate wants to privatize social security AND get out of Iraq AND legalize gay marriage AND “cut government spending” in some nebulous way. Five times as many people on either side of the political divide abominate half of what the “Boaz cohort” stands for.
Brink Lindsay’s vision of “liberaltarianism” was doomed by this. And his timing was fatally bad: the Democratic Party is becoming more populist economically, not less. Meanwhile the Republican Party is becoming more militarist and moralistic. The Boaz cohort, if it takes up partisan politics at all, has to give up hope of advancing all its desires at once. A “libertarian” who works on behalf of the Republican Party, formally or informally, will be helping to involve the country in longer and newer wars, and will be enabling retrograde policies toward pregnant women, gay people, recreational-drug consumers and people implicated, rightly or wrongly, in “terrorism” broadly defined. The “libertarian” who takes up the cause of upper-case Democrats will be working toward higher marginal tax rates, nationalized health care and broader regulation of finance and industry. There is no use pretending otherwise.
A perfectly reasonable libertarian response is to refuse either approach. In favor of this reaction is the recognition that - see the list of (libertarian) evils above? You’re probably going to get plenty of Column A even if Party B is in power, and vice verse. A perfectly reasonable “liberal” (or conservative!) response to the refusal is, “Well, who needs you anyway?” Then the refusenik says, Oh boo hoo! I’m not “useful” to hegemonist busybodies? Let me bravely fight back the tears!
So maybe the moral question isn’t, what use can libertarians be to liberals, but what use can libertarians be to anybody? We are not going to bring about either a minarchist or anarcho-capitalist society anytime soon, where “soon” can be translated as ever. Truth be told, I’m not convinced that a purely minarchist society would be all that great to live in. As for anarcho-capitalism, I think even a lot of an-caps agree that it requires a long-term project of learning how to live that way as society. I think libertarians are, rather, the court jesters of politics. I mean that in a good way. We whisper to Caesar that that he is mortal. We caper about, turning ourselves blue if necessary, reminding everyone that government power is inescapably violent and inescapably self-interested. You’re probably not going to care, but we’re going to make you actively decide not to care. And sometimes, maybe you’ll care after all. As a class, we can be stupendously silly people, believing and saying the most absurd things. But our rulers are silly people too, in different and more malignant ways. And as fools, we have the freedom to say so.
Given a choice of role models, I think I’d like to be Feste from Twelfth Night, especially as played by Ben Kingsley in the movie. I’d like to have his core of sweetness, his resignation to the evils of the world leavened by a capacity for enjoyment, or vice verse.
April 19th, 2008 at 9:38 am
An interesting post. On that definition was Groucho Marx the embodiment of libertarianism?
April 19th, 2008 at 10:20 am
*I think libertarians are, rather, the court jesters of politics. I mean that in a good way. We whisper to Caesar that that he is mortal.*
I think you sell yourself short. In any X-libertarian fusion (whether X is “conservative” or “liberal,” “red state” or “blue state”), libertarians end up, necessarily, trying to make arguments that are compelling to group X, and those arguments offer group X a way to gracefully back away from its worst mistakes without having to concede points to its main opposition.
April 19th, 2008 at 10:34 am
Motherfuck, Tim, but that’s an interesting idea. Hunh.
That is a kind of jesterism, though, isn’t it?
April 19th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Yeah, I’m with Tim: We libertarians don’t have a program that will be accepted (I’m not even sure that we libertarians have a program that would work even if it was accepted) but we do have valuable critiques.
And on a few issues, I maintain that our recommendations ARE the best program. One obvious place is the war in Iraq. Another place, perhaps more controversial to some, is drug legalization. OK, I’ll grant that if recreational drugs are legalized there might be some interest in at least regulating distribution and safety and all that, and maybe the pure libertarian approach wouldn’t be perfect. However, any half-way sane scheme of regulating recreational drugs would be SO much better than prohibition, and compared to the status quo it would be like 99% libertarian.
So let’s not sell our libertarian selves short on what we have to offer.
April 19th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Henley, you magnificent bastard, I am utterly charmed by your unique admixture of realism, radicalism, and graceful prose.
Another way to phrase your point is that libertarianism is just a political version of skepticism. Not all libertarians are like that–there are some who are absolutely in love with Big Business or are true religious believers or what have you.
But some great number of libertarians are just fallibilists: they have an extreme skepticism about the possibility of knowing Big Things or executing Great Plans and that colors their (our) view of government. It’s libertarianism less as a political philosophy and more as an epistemic stance.
Shorter: libertarians have their bullshit meters set to hair trigger.
April 19th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Fascinating post.
As a liberal, I have a question for libertarians. There is a libertarian trope - or perhaps it is more of an obsession - which has never made much sense to me, and that has to do with the scale of government. I’m not sure why libertarians are so set on government being small. I think of scale simply as a product of function, and I would think you would want the government to be of the scale that would match your sense of the functions it should play. The fetishization of smallness as a good in itself seems to be a way of avoiding talking about the functions that you want the state to take on. And, in fact, the current administration, with its pious talk of small government and its 500 billion dollar deficit, is a perfect instance of the separation of ’scale’ talk from reality.
When I look at the last sixty years in the West, which has been the greatest period of mass prosperity in history, I see a range of the size of the state as a part of the GDP which seems to move to a natural average - and if I were really concerned with giving some meaning to this concern with scale (if it does matter how big it is), then I would think my arguments would at least note this fact. But when the scale of the state as part of the GDP is noted, it is always noted as something horrible in itself. I find that, well, amusing. It is like noting what a terrible thing it is that people above 6 foot 9 dominate in basketball, when it used to be that 5 foot niners could join the club.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Hot damn–the Big Dawg has shown up!
I’m not so sure liberals and narrow cohort libertarians are entirely useless to each other. We’re still potential allies in the kind of prioritized dismantling you mentioned in that post about crutches and shackles. We can agree to disagree on the liberal agenda for new government programs, and recognize that there’s no basis there for common action–and still work together on dismantling government interventions that serve the interests of big business and the plutocracy. Narrow cohort libertarians don’t have to convert liberals to the nonaggression principle to have fruitful cooperation on removing “shackles” right now.
Roger: Part of the problem is, you seem to be taking the “functions” of government as a given. I would argue that most of the functions of government involve regulating and stabilizing a corporate economy whose origins were not in any sense “necessary,” but which is itself a result of top-down government intervention. I would also argue that, in the period of prosperity under corporate liberalism (ca. 1932-1970), as much as half our workweeks involved paying for layers of Rube Goldberg irrationality: e.g., the cost of shipping goods from a large factory a thousand miles a way that could be more efficiently produced in a small one twenty miles away; buying factory farmed produce that could be more efficiently grown locally on small farms; oligopoly markups; brand name differentiation that served mainly to repackage commodities at a 400% markup; push marketing that served mainly to dispose of overproduced goods whose production reflected the internal needs of corporations rather than a response to autonomous demand…. and on, and on, and on.
The question that occurs to me, regarding the prosperity of the mid-20th century, is compared to what? We have to consider the road not taken. What we got was the economy celebrated by Alfred Chandler. IMO we’d have been better off with the kind of economy described by Lewis Mumford and Ralph Borsodi.
The corporate state has been “efficient,” mainly, at solving problems posed by the corporate state.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Kevin, compared to any other society that went before.
However, my liking for that corporate state is a liking for the state doing those things. Your liking for another social arrangement is for a state doing other things. But I don’t want my corporate state being either too small or too big. I want it to be the right size for doing the things I want it to do - among them, really, is balancing efficiency against equality, for instance. Now, your non-corporate state is not about doing those things. Fine. But your argument is about a non-corporate state - not about a smaller government. Scale, with your state and with mine, is simply about function. In itself, it is a meaningless shibboleth.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
“Scale, with your state and with mine, is simply about function. In itself, it is a meaningless shibboleth.”
That’s true, Rodger. I would assume that some libertarians use the scale of government as a quick, short-hand way of referencing much larger concerns they have. Those larger concerns are both complicated to explain and also difficult to measure. But scale, especially government spending as a percent of GDP, is easy to measure and therefore offers a useful shortcut. Scale is not my issue, but I am sympathetic to the need to have some shortcut methods for measuring complicated subjects. So long as people remember it is just a shortcut to something more important.
By analogy, if I had a fever of 103, I’d be worried. I would not really be worried about the fever, I’d be worried about what might be causing that fever. But core body tempature does offer a useful shortcut to getting at something vastly more complex - the issue of “Am I healhty?”
April 19th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Jackson, that’s an excellent analogy. You don’t want a doctor whose philosophy is: the lower the bodily temperature, the better. You want one who realizes that the body runs a normal temperature. Unfortunately, American politicians are more like the quack doctor. And like that doctor, their policies, under the slogan, the smaller the government the better, lead not only to terrible government, but also to expensive, corruption prone government.
April 19th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Kevin-
What you’re talking about is an alliance between libertarians and a portion of the left that is not in power. What Jim is talking about is an alliance between libertarians and the portion of the left that does enjoy some amount of power.
We libertarians are not terribly useful to the portion of the left that does enjoy power, and if we side with them we have to give up a lot–not merely agree to defer certain issues, but elect people who will actively work for and achieve things that we view as a step backward.
The portion of the left that you are most interested in has no more power than libertarians (so neither side is really useful to anybody) but they still outnumber us (so libertarians won’t be the senior partners).
I still think that we libertarians are most useful for ideas, critiques, and for activism on select issues, something closer to what Jim and Tim said above.
April 19th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Ain’t he, tho?
I’ve been a libertarian all of my adult life, and as with Jim, until recently for me that meant believing I tilted right. In my case, that was easier in the 80s because I then shared the view that most abortions ought to be criminalized. (A position I no longer hold, even tho I think too many pro-choicers make morally repugnant arguments; my views on the status of the embryo/fetus have not changed, merely my position as to the feasibility and justice of criminalizing early abortions.)
As a “nontraditional” undergrad student in that same decade, I ran into inane left-wing academics who drove me batshit insane, thereby confirming that I was correct in favoring conservatives over the left.
Of course, I also watched Reagan ratchet up the drug “war” by many magnitudes, and then in the 90s a depraved right-wing attack machine peddling all manner of viciousness about the Clintons that really made me ill. (”Lesbian Hillary killed her lover Vince Foster on her way to burning her Rose Law firm billing records, and forgot to bury him where the other 40 or so Clinton murder victims rest undiscovered.”)
But it was Bush&Co. in these Naught years that pulled me sharply back toward the areas where libertarians have generally always had more in common with liberals: civil liberties, and opposition to imperialist wars and the military-industrial complex. If I had to pnipoint one single event that really began my path toward favoring the left over the right, it was the Schiavo derangement. After that, I seriously began considering what the clowns who woulddo that were perpetrating in other areas, and had an, um, “awakening.”
April 19th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Welcome, Jim,
A cracker of an opening post. I just want to add that many far-left types frequently feel just as powerless as libertarians to influence the direction of the Democratic party and that is why people do stupid things like vote Nader. `
We are cursed with a well-entrenched two-party system. However, the saving grace is the identity of those parties are pretty fluid. If you hold your nose and pick a side, you’ll have an infinitesimal influence on the party. If you don’t pick a side, you will have zero influence. I have recently had to do this in the Taiwanese election even though I hate both the parties here for varied and ever revolving reasons.
When it comes to being the opinion-influencing “court jesters” though, the libertarians have a great advantage. Americans love Liberty!(tm). So stuff with the Liberty!(tm) stamp upon it such as “Republicanism — now with small-government goodness!” sells well to the American public, regardless of what’s in the box. Use this power wisely, and hopefully future “X-libertarian” alliances will see some freedom inside the box too.
April 19th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
If you don’t pick a side, you will have zero influence.
With the help of libertarianism’s handy methodological individualism, the idea of a simple two sided scenario is difficult to defend. There are many forces at work that help to shape society apart from political parties. An ideology that can contribute time and money to both the ACLU and the Institute for Justice, for instance, is something worthwhile.
April 19th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I like the jester analogy. It seems oddly fitting. The beauty of the jester is that he doesn’t really have to pick a side.
Meanwhile, he has a hell of a lot more positive influence than the court sycophant, who just serves to reinforce what the king was going to do anyways.
Besides, being a jester is a lot more fun.
April 19th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I’ll try to contribute what I can to this debate. I’ve never really been a liberal or an “orthodox” libertarian, so maybe I’m out of my league. I’m a classical anarchist, or “libertarian socialist”, and these are the traditions I identify with:
http://porkupineblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/myth-of-socialism-as-statism.html
The other day I was speaking with some graduate students who had expressed bewilderment at some of my heterodox views, and I tried to break my outlook down by arguing that I side with the “far left” on economic and civil liberties issues (I’m to the left of Noam Chomsky) and the “far right” on being anti-government, pro-2nd Amendment, in favor of decentralism and localism, “isolationist” in foreign policy (like the Swiss-although I could also be considered “far left” on this as well as I generally sympathize with 3rd World nationalism). Probably the most rightward aspect of my thinking (and controversial) is my insistence that “non-progressive” cultures have the right to exist, whether Islamic tribes in Afghanistan or Pakistan, polygamous cults in Texas, fundamentalist religious sects who prefer their own institutions, racialists who prefer their own separatist enclaves, aboriginal peoples’ in Australia, or hedonist cultures committed to an ethos of sex, drugs and rockn’roll.
In the interests of full disclosure, there you have it.
Why am I against the state? The state is an institution of mass murder. The twentieth century was a unique time as states started acquiring unprecedented levels of power. Not coincidentally, the body count started to rise. Check out the work of R.J. Rummell on this. He estimates 170 million people were killed by their own governments in the 20th century. That’s an incredible figure.
Now, I’ll grant that the majority of these were “undemocratic”, to use conventional political science terminology, and that the big body counts came from Nazis, Commies, Idi Amin, etc. However, I’m not so sure the body count is that much lower when we consider the number of people killed by democratic governments in countries other than their own. The democratic states do not seem to produce the domestic body count of a Hitler or Stalin, but in foreign matters there is a little more gray area.
For instance, a number of independent researchers like Johan Galtung, Chomsky, Peter Dale Scott, former CIA man John Stockwell and some others have generally estimated six million killed in coups, covert actions or counterinsurgency campaigns carried out by the US government. The body count from Central America circa 1980-1992 is easily well into the hundreds of thousands. The number of Vietnamese who died from US involvement in the war there is probably in the millions. The US destabilization of Cambodia is what allowed Pol Pot to seize that country (and the US supported him after the Vietnamese ran him out). The best estimates of casualties in Iraq amount to 500,000 to 1 million since 2003, maybe half a million between 1992-2002, at least another couple hundred thousand in 1991 (probably much more).
This not a good track record to say the least. Even on domestic matters, while the US has yet to cross the line into Hitlerian or Stalinist territory, it’s also true that one quarter of the world’s prisoners are in the US (the highest per capita). The US is second only to China in the number of annual executions. There are 36,000 paramilitary police raids on private residences annually. There are more black male Americans in jail than there were under apartheid. Again, not a very good track record.
As a “leftwing” libertarian, I have no use for big business, big banking, big media, the military-industrial complex, capitalists, landlords, welfare corporations, big oil, big pharma, etc. In fact, I dare to say I probably oppose most of that stuff more fervently than anyone else on this blog, except maybe Kevin Carson, as I’m the one who advocates a lumpenproletarian class revolution.
I just disagree that government is any better than any of these other institutions. If anything it is worse. I’m flexible on this. For instance, I could see using the system’s power of eminent domain against the class enemy by, say, municipalizing the cartels of the medical-industrial complex and converting these into mutualist-syndicalist worker-consumer cooperatives.
Speaking for myself, I’ve had numerous run-ins with family, schools, organized religion, bosses and cops in my lifetime, and as a general rule I would have to say cops and other state agents are the worst. Those who want to expand the state and the police power to save us all from these other things are, IMO, similar to those who want to treat the flu with chemotherapy.
As for how anti-state radicals, decentralists, anarchists, libertarians, whatever we may be, can exercise more influence over society, I’d say from what I’ve seen most in our camp haven’t really given much serious thought to the matter. I think it’s a mistake to try to convert the masses at large to “our side”. Rather, we should seek to be able to achieve a position for ourselves where we can wield power and influence far beyond our numbers. I’ve written about this extensively. Take my views for what you will.
http://attackthesystem.com/liberty-and-populism-building-an-effective-resistance-movement-for-north-america/
April 19th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Great post.
blogged.
April 19th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Roger: Libertarians refer to “big government” for the same reason that when such rhetoric is unfortunately appropriated by people who don’t mean it it still helps: people tend, for understandable reason, to see a government that does things they don’t want it to do as by definition “big”. At the same time, one that does what they do want it to do can’t be too “big”.
This relative interpretation serves as another hurdle to libertarianism, because while virtually no one would say out loud “why yes, I want a big government”, the majority of politically coherent folks each have their pet features of the State which they see no big deal over — and conflict with everyone else over them. Sure, we can argue with one person about their particular attachment, but libertarianism at its root dismisses ALL of them. In that respect, since bickering over competing initiatives to be carried out by force is what politics boils down to, libertarianism is anti-politics itself.
No wonder we have virtually no political influence. Would you expect a militant vegan to cook good BBQ?
The silver lining, however, with respect to any liberal-libertarian alliance is that the “no big deal” attachments of most liberals are the type of things that are debatable on the means — helping the poor, protecting the environment, that kind of thing — while the attachments of the Right-wing are deal-breakers on the ends themselves. In a way, “good” government & “small” government both have a liberal bias.
My own preference is for no government in the long run. I just figure it’s more reasonable to shrink it & grow used to less and less of it than to go cold turkey.
April 20th, 2008 at 4:30 am
Learn from the Irish, who developed “join and sabotage” to a fine art as the non-violent part of their mixed strategy from the early 19th century onward.
April 20th, 2008 at 7:17 am
Kevin Carson:
you say–
This seems to amount to a claim that in true free-market, the little guy will always beat the distant, giant corporate competitor. Can you really be arguing that economies of scale never obtain except when the government rigs the process?
This seems overly romantic and false as an empirical matter.
April 20th, 2008 at 11:52 am
roger,
The only way to determine in any meaningful sense the “proper” size of government is to ask “proper for *what*?” And I explained why I thought most of the functions actually carried out by a government of the size you support involve subsidizing and correcting the instabilities of a corporate economy the government created in the first place.
I suppose it’s technically true to say that a radically smaller degree of government is “just another form of state,” in the same sense that calling for a reduced crime rate is just calling for a crime rate of a different kind. But I believe the main function of government in American history, by its qualitative nature, has been to protect privilege and subsidize the wealthy.
chuckles,
I don’t for a moment deny that economies of scale exist–only that the enormous size of the corporations dominating our economy has anything to do with them. Of course economies of scale exist. But the effect of government policy is to artificially shift them upward–way, way upward. The ideal economy of scale, in any particular case, reflects a total package of costs and returns. In almost every case, the effect of government intervention is to shift costs off of the large operators and to increase their returns. The central function of government in the mixed economy is to subsidize the operating costs of big business, to subsidize capital accumulation, and to regulate competition so as to protect stable oligopoly markets. The secondary function of government is to regulate the nasty side effects of the corporate economy it created: keynesian fiscal policies to remedy maldistribution of income and underconsumption, public works and a permanent war economy to absorb oveproduction, and an aggressive foreign policy to forcibly open up markets for surplus goods and capital.
April 21st, 2008 at 9:17 am
Chuckles,
Have you ever read any of Hayek’s theories about the distribution of knowledge in society? If you have, wouldn’t they have some impact regarding ‘optimal’ levels of scale, as discovered by market processes?
As far as any “empirical” argument, I’m not sure what economy you’re basing your argument on. We haven’t had a free market for a long, long time, if we ever did.
April 21st, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Personally, I find it amusing that people are debating whether or not there should be a liberal/libertarian alliance as if there is a possibility of any other political realignment occurring in American politics.
I mean this in all seriousness. We can argue over what exactly a “liberal-tarian” means in practice and alter the details, but the overall direction of change is already baked in at this point. The idea that liberalism can possibly become dominant simply by presenting the New New Deal is just as ridiculous as the Paulistas delusions that the GOP can be rescued from neo-conservatism. The association of libertarianism with the Right is dying and in politics there can only be two teams. The Left will become libertarian simply because that’s what’s going to win more elections.
Liberals can’t just appeal to other liberals in order to be successful. They’ve tried that strategy for the last 40 years and essentially conceded the field to the conservatives (and, increasingly, authoritarians). They have to ally with libertarians. If not libertarian, then who?