2008-07-25»
Coming Out»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”)