I’ve found it kind of odd to watch in myself that for the past decade I’ve steadfastedly declined to announce my politics to anyone, even to close friends. It’s not because I’m indifferent about politics; it’s because I’ve felt that about the best label for what I believe has been tarnished by association.
So, here is what I whisper to myself at night, and get teased by my partners for slyly adopting at home and furiously evading the rest of the time. I guess I’m a… No, dammit, I am a libertarian.
I’m just not that sort of libertarian.
I’m a libertarian not because I think that white Western males like me are suffering under some terrible yoke of hardship: I’m a libertarian because I think that I’m extraordinarily privileged in terms of the freedoms that I do have; and that I believe that it is this privilege that provides the engine of my many other advantages. As someone who believes that, I naturally seek to spread that as much freedom to as wide a group as possible.
I sort of get the fist-waving anger at high taxes and your right to smoke down the pub, but it’s not really what I’m here for. I’m a low-hanging-fruit kind of guy, so I believe in crafting tools for people that will expand their freedom more widely, and building a culture and institutions that permit the maximum amount of freedom and the minimal amount of coercion. I’m an optimist, ultimately, about the power of self-determination to make the world a better place.
What I see online presents another view of the inhabitants of Libertaria. A lot of self-identified libertarians present themselves online as a victim of government and of other tyrants in the world (including, but not limited to, liberals, conservatives, the mainstream media, feminists, Christians, Muslims, immigrants, workers, the elite, and people who censor comments on their noticeboards). At the same time, others’ misfortunes are presented as their own personal responsibility, for which no-one else can and should give a flying Philadelphia fart. Charity should only be dispensed to the truly hopeless; changing the conditions of the hopeless is an impossible task we should leave to the fates, not each other, and certainly not the speaker.
I don’t think any of those positions automatically arise from a belief in freedom. I do think they lead you to be a bit of a dick.
When you actually meet a libertarian, much of the time, you’ll find the online stance gives an incredibly misleading impression. If anything, they seem more optimistic about how the world works, and more understanding of their own good fortune and the tribulations of others. They’re smart, and charitable and generous, and less doctrinaire than most political thinkers on every point. Also fun. Obviously, they then accidentally shoot you with their concealed firearm and then finish you off with second-hand smoke, but, hey, you should see what the Randians would do to you.
Of course, you also meet libertarians that are dicks, too, but not really in any higher proportion than any other group. (I’ve long ago abandoned my search for a set of ideological principles that magically turn you into a nice person: I think the final straw was meeting a total arse of a Quaker. How can you be a Quaker, for God’s sake, and still be horrible? Truly, God is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a tortilla.)
Anyway, I think I would have still come out as a libertarian, if it hadn’t been for the tremendous schism in the libertarian community over the response to 9/11 and the Iraqi war. If you knew a real libertarian, dear reader, you would be amazed by how many came out in support of Operation Flail Like A Dangerous Hyperpowered Idiot. If, by contrast, you gained your knowledge of libertarian thought post-2001, you’d assume that they were all about the “anti-idiotarian” flag-waving.
The split freaked me, and many of my friends, the hell out. Nothing to me seemed more counterintuitive, more contradictory, more challenging to my own beliefs than seeing libertarians who devote their life to campaigning for the minimization of the State’s involvement in their lives enthusiastically encouraging the world’s largest State military to rampage in the lives (and deaths) of thousands of individuals as a co-ordinated response to the murderous actions of a handful of extremists with no connection to those targetted. If this was performed by a non-State actor, would they have supported it? If so, would they accept the same action taken upon themselves?
And yet, somehow, this became the dominant idea in Net libertarian circles in both the US and the UK. In the end, I had to admit to myself that most of the libertarians I knew worked on a moral calculus that was unconnected to their love of freedom. Which is fine, but it’s not my moral calculus — or indeed my cultural bent. If I was going to identify as libertarian, I’d end up being painted as a special kind of traitorous, deluded, idiotarian, Dhimmist pseudo-libertarian, and frankly if I wanted that kind of ostracisation, I’d join traditional political in-fighting.
Now, it’s my suspicion that I’m not the only one in this position. I think that the whole Ron Paul movement was representative of the wish many to have a libertarianism they could trust not to claim that “using the state to carry the war back to the aggressors is our only practical instrument of self-defense” is an honorable view. I’m not a Paulite, but he definitely appealed to a similar bloc of believers. What I think needs to happen is for this group of exiles to coalesce; after that I think that the moment is ripe for the flurry of ideas that marks the beginning of a new (or revitalised) political position.
I guess it’s because I’ve been waiting for that coalescence for so long that I’m finally admitting that I want to be a part of it.
(I hereby pre-emptively declare this “Post I will most regret having comments on”)
July 26th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Tis a funny thing. People confuse Authoritarian vs Libertarian with Communal vs Individual when they are actually orthogonal. Western Libertarian thought always seems to have the needle pegged out to the right hand side of the 4 quadrants (Individual) and with a pronounced tendency to give up all that good old liberty when threatened from outside. And yet there are plenty of examples of Communal Libertarianism being strikingly successful. It’s not exactly life and death (though maybe it is) but the whole Open Source movement is a good example of Anarcho-Syndicalism or Communal Libertarianism.
The ones to be really scared of are the Right Wing Authoritarians. RWA is the top right. Not only do they live entirely for themselves, but they also want to tell you how to live in order to further their own goals. And since they believe only in personal success there are no limitations to their greed. Things have to get *really* bad before self interest kicks in. This is the enormously successful set of Western Corporate Ethics that have now subsumed North American and mid-Atlantic political ethics.
Me? I like to think I sit bottom middle. Libertarian but recognising that both Self and Society are important. I don’t want anyone telling people what to do. But I also want people to have a strong sense that they are a part of the society in which they live.
Like some cheese eating, surrender monkey said. Ok. We’ve got the Liberte and Egalite, now what about the Fraternite?
July 26th, 2008 at 2:02 am
Ron Paul scored +1 for returning the dollar to the Gold Standard (!) but blew it with the tech-libertarians with his scepticism about evolution, didn’t he?
July 26th, 2008 at 5:11 am
Very brave coming out as a Libertarian, especially given the many different meanings and traditions associated with the term. I really empathise, especially with your attempt to show just how hypocritical and selfish attitudes of many libertarians on what would still be called the ‘right’. I always wonder why wingnuts like the Samizdata bunch are not supporters of liberation movements and groups like the Iraqi insurgency, but it seems their principles are nothing of the kind.
I have been wrestling with a growing attachment to the term ‘libertarian’ for some time, and for many of the same reasons – essentially a belief in the goodness of humanity and a sense that if we are more or less free to act, think and associate, then that is a good default position in terms of maximising utility, etc.
But the problem is the idea that political ideas or traditions are CTF games, where one set of ideas can provide all the answers. Liberalism, libertarianism, social democracy, conservatism, anarchism, Islamism, communisim all have some good ideas to offer in certain contexts, and consistency is massively overrated. That’s why I have hopes for Obama, who is left and right at the same time on different things, humanist in the outcomes he seeks, but pragmatic about how to achieve them.
It sounds trite, but it really is about people not ideas, and we should always beware placing the ideas above humanity. I wrote about this in a biz context recently: http://www.headshift.com/blog/2008/07/free-the-battery-humans.php
Thanks for sharing this. I love your writing, so I guess I better pay the piper a bit more ;-)
July 26th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Eh. Seems like everybody’s a Libertarian. Or rather, as Bob Barr says, “everybody in this country is Libertarian about something.” I’m not so sure I’m buying your dichotomy between the internet blowhards and the Real Libertarians (or between Libertarians and Objectivists, for that matter). Ron Paul is a pretty textbook Libertarian, even leaving his fundie anti-abortion stuff to the states. Though that isn’t quite the same as leaving it to the individual, is it? Either way he’d be pretty scary in office. The best a really scrupulous Libertarian can offer, when actually placed in charge of anything governmental, is to maintain his own principles with flawless rigor while going down with the ship.
I was raised on Ayn Rand and only in the last six or seven years turned from there to a pretty boringly standard-issue liberal/hippie position; I still feel a kind of nostalgic affection for Libertarian thinking, the sort of geometric purity of it, and I remember why that’s so satisfying. I feel sometimes that even now my liberalism is just a raft of particulars overlaid on what is still a Libertarian framework. Not sure. What I do know, though, is that the change coincided with a shift from feeling like I was above politics and above caring about the daily particulars of the news (and, by the by, knowing squat about same) to the most intense newshound period of my life, hours a day of reading, both current events and the background I kept finding necessary to understand them. It doesn’t leave me the best-informed human on the planet, but there can be no doubt that I know scads more than my earlier, lofty-pronouncement-issuing self. When I meet someone who reminds me of that earlier self I want to grab him by the lapels and shake him around (and on some level I suppose that’s exactly what I’ve been doing to my actual earlier self).
Libertarianism is all built on this charming Lockeian idea of the world being an infinite frontier populated by isolated lone actors, harvesting infinite resources, owing no fiscal, practical or intellectual debts to anyone–not that anybody thinks we live in that world now, but Libertarians genuinely seem to believe that it really was that way once, before somebody invented government all at a stroke.
It’s funny, they are so lost in a cloudland of simply drawn ideals, and routinely dismiss the hippie liberals–who in my experience are usually fantastically well informed and understand with kenness and subtlety what makes the world behave as it does–mostly by assuming them all to be absolutist Marxists (with stereotypically insufferable habits of dress, of course).
They also, as you note, cheerfully consign the poor to death by starvation if in the event they can’t support themselves in the prevailing economic system, and they have a stubborn resistance to any causal subtleties that might be supposed to have made the fortunes of rich and poor a little less perfectly just. These things, I realize, you disclaim; but what then is left of Libertarianism, once you’ve done away with this rigid monetary evaluation of all moral questions? Just a loose rule of thumb that letting people do what they will is to be vastly preferred whenever possible, plus the belief that “whenever possible” is in fact most of the time?
Hell, if that’s all it is, then I’m still a Libertarian. But in that case you simply won’t be able to make yourself understood without passing out copies of this post every time you invoke that label.
(But alas, all of this sort of stuff is better suited to unhurried, interruptive rambling over a tabeltop stained by micromanaged beverages. Perhaps someday we’ll have such a chance.)
July 26th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I think my standard reply on all comments on this blog will be “you might be right, at that”.
The question I’m asking is: how can I make myself understood without handing out this post? What label should I adopt It occurred to me that the term I’ve heard used in a slightly different context is “civil libertarianism”, which I like from the double-edged nature of it: the emphasis on rights, as well as the emphasis on not being a klaxon-voiced buffoon.
I also note from the Wikipedia entry that I work for one of the organizations most prominently affiliated with it, which makes an embarrassing amount of sense.
July 26th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
I often describe myself as “a classical liberal, perhaps a libertarian”. Just putting it like that allows me to get the point across that I’m not a card-carrying, capital-L Libertarian, but just someone who likes freedom and minimal government. But generally I don’t have much problem with describing myself as a libertarian. If you spend all your life reading politics blogs then yes, you would have some bad associations with that word. But it turns out that most normal people don’t spend all their lives reading politics blogs so they don’t have any particularly strong associations one way or the other.
Anyway, it’s not half as bad as when I actually get into the nuts and bolts of my philosophy and start using words like “free markets” or (God forbid) “capitalism”. Here in the UK, at least, that’s a conversation killer.
July 27th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Read your site for the first time last week and thought to my self “Is this guy a libertarian”? Guess I was right. I usually describe my libertarian view as being Liberal but not Socialist. I don’t find much distinction between the Right and Left. They both want to use the power of government to force adherence to a very strict social behavior system. Libertarians don’t want to deny anyone the right to be like an idiot but we will use government to keep your idiocy from keeping anyone else from being an idiot.
July 29th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Danny – you are actually a liberal.
I know, I know. That brand offends you, you hate it. Brand X sucks, Brand Y is great! But in today’s world, the liberals are the only ones on the Libertarian end of the political scale. There aren’t any (never have been many, but aren’t any now) I-want-to-run-your-life liberals in the world. (Try to find someone who is an honest-to-God Communist. Not someone labelled by Fox News as a commie, but a real commie. There aren’t any.) There are lots and lots of I-want-to-run-your-life conservatives, and for that matter, Libertarians.
All the millions of people who marched against the Iraq War, and still do so today – liberals. Feel free to join us. IF – and I say if – IF we ever start advocating something that you’re uncomfortable with, feel free to leave.
Thomas Jefferson summed up government as always consisting of two parties – one that was for the people, and one that was for the elites. This is an insight that is often lost, despite being very simple. One problem with U.S. politics today is that both major parties are for the elites… Those who believe that power should lie in individuals rather than in the elites are a huge bloc in the U.S., but currently unrepresented in Congress, which is why Congress has a 9% approval rating.
July 29th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Hey, I know communists! Or, at least, Marxists. The remaining ones party very hard.
Oh, I hang out with liberals a lot, and I dare say I am one from a distance. I’d vote for Obama, if I could. But I feel uncomfortable with a lot of the liberal line in the US at least, so I don’t think I can self-identify. Maybe at some point we can FIGHT and DRINK over it…
August 2nd, 2008 at 11:22 am
Hullo, please pardon delay… so yes, actually I think your “civil libertarian” solution is pretty spot on, in each particular. In fact at some point while rambling I’d meant to say something similar but I lost the thought.
Just as well since I was already proving on my own person that the pompous speechifying is the last thing to go.
August 4th, 2008 at 12:52 am
“Two countries separated by a common language”. And never more so than when using political labels. What is this “Liberal” or “Libertarian” you speak of?
Dear anon, “There are lots and lots of I-want-to-run-your-life conservatives”. Yup, Right Wing Authoritarians are extremely dangerous. Not only do they have no morals and no sense of society but they want to tell you what to do *to further their ends* not yours. They’re almost literally a cancer in the body politic.
Take the Political Compass quadrant. Left-Right, Social-Individual across the page. Authoritarian, Libertarian from top to bottom. I bet you and most well informed, educated people end up dead centre and just below the middle line. We prefer not to be told what to do, but we recognise that some people do need to be for the good of society. We appreciate the improvements to quality of life that arise from capitalist, free market thinking but think that some aspects of life get worse with this and some social ethics are needed to balance corporate/individual ethics. But unfortunately while this makes us fairly mainstream Guardian readers in the UK, it makes us rabid “liberal” (as a term of abuse) socialists in the USA.
August 25th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
[…] I’ve been a partisan now for exactly a month, and it’s been great fun. If anything, it’s allowed me to be far more outright […]
August 26th, 2008 at 2:07 am
The fact that Ron Paul scored with the techie sorts for wanting to return the US to the gold standard proves something that I’ve thought for a while: most techies, while very technically adept, know nothing about economics.
August 26th, 2008 at 6:36 am
That’s actually one incorrect generalisation piled on another. Firstly, I don’t think Ron Paul particularly scored highly with techies for returning to the gold standard, who I think mostly default to the standard idea about economics which is that the gold standard is a bit whacko. Two, you can definitely pluck out a minority of economists who *do* presumably know something about economics, and who have advocated for a return to the gold standard.
August 26th, 2008 at 8:51 am
I have a similar problem with labeling myself an Anarchist or a Situationist. All of these labels end up sounding (to me at least) like party political affiliations, and I’ve never been a joiner. Maybe it’s just worrying about the crass assumptions that people will make. Were there any other labels you considered claiming in the hope that they were less tainted?
August 26th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Hey, I was just riffing off Dave (above) on the Ron Paul stuff. Mind you, I do tend to find an awful lot of techies who don’t understand economics. See also the belief that advertising revenue can solve all problems, and that because something is free at point of sale, it costs nothing to make.
“Two, you can definitely pluck out a minority of economists who *do* presumably know something about economics, and who have advocated for a return to the gold standard.”
As that Wikipedia entry states, “followers of the Austrian School of Economics, objectivists and libertarians”. There’s a reason they’re in the minority of economists. It’s because they’re whackos. As the Wikipedia entry on the Austrian school says, “Austrian theories are not formulated in formal mathematical form, but using verbal logic.”
Economists who don’t use maths. Hmm. What do you think?
August 26th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I think you have to be careful of equating “don’t understand $TOPIC” with “don’t agree with me about $TOPIC”. One of the frustrating truths about discovering the full range of people’s opinions is that actually there are a lot of people who are extremely knowledgeable about a certain topic, but who are wrong. It doesn’t mean they don’t understand it; in fact, they probably understand elements of it far better than I do, but they are nonetheless wrong. The biggest problem with it as a modern tactic of argument is that eventually somebody pops out of the woodwork who can kick your ass on $TOPIC, and is given to uttering all kinds of points that are clearly (to you at least) nuts. If you rely on the “doesn’t understand $TOPIC”, you have to waste almost as much time trying to prove that they don’t understand something as you do to acknowledging their arguments.
In the face of that, most of us have to come up with rules of thumb like “well, they don’t use maths, so they must be crAAzy”. In terms of competing schools where at least some groups on either side respect the other’s opinions, criticism like Bryan Caplan‘s (or wandering further afield, Brad deLong) is more useful than those sort of broad strokes.
August 27th, 2008 at 2:44 am
Let me put it another way: Would you trust the opinion on how to program of someone who’d never programmed, or, for that matter, never touched a computer? For economists, not being willing (or able) to use maths to express your theories is the equivalent of that.
There are points at which somebody’s difference of opinion steps over the line into just not being on the same planet in terms of conversation – and Austrian School economics falls into that category. It sounds like economics, and it’s easier to understand because it doesn’t include all that obtuse maths, but it’s no more economics than Objectivism is philosophy (and oh, how I enjoyed arguing that point on USENET in the 90’s).
You know how you argument with people like, say scientologists and they start off rationally talking. Then, ten minutes into the conversation they say something which makes makes you go “No, wait – how the HELL did we get here?” It’s an epistomological issue, a category error. You assumed you were talking about how to feel better about your life. They, on the other hand, knew you were both talking about Xenu. Those kinds of conversations are like a Venn diagram where two circles don’t meet.