...final word (for now) on libertarians vs. conservatives

Really Strange Bedfellows II
A final word (for now) on libertarians vs. conservatives
by Nick Gilespie

It's been a long, long while since I've been accused of impairing the morals of a minor (really). In fact, the last time I can remember such a claim being leveled against me was back in high school when I coaxed some classmates at good old Mater Dei High School into seeing Monty Python's Life of Brian rather than a less theologically charged movie. Some of my friends' mothers--and a buttinsky parish priest--saw my actions as proof positive of heretical tendencies (this, even in a very post-Vatican II atmosphere).

So the recent charges by National Review Online Editor Jonah Goldberg that what he calls my brand of "cultural libertarianism" is partly to blame both for 20-year-old John Walker's defection to the Taliban and for "campuses today [being] infested with so many silly radicals" really make me feel young again. For that early Christmas present, I thank him. He's recently signaled that he's putting this particular hobbyhorse back in the closet for a while and I fully intend to follow suit after these few more words on the matter.

Beyond its particulars, this exchange--prompted by Jonah's taking exception to my editor's note in the January Reason--helps clarify important ideological differences not only between our respective publications but between libertarians and conservatives more generally. These differences are worth underscoring, if only because they are not going away anytime soon. Indeed, especially with the hardcore Marxian left becoming increasingly irrelevant and centrist liberals essentially acknowledging the efficiency of markets and grappling more and more with libertarian arguments for free expression and lifestyle choice, the debate between libertarians and conservatives is likely to assume greater and greater significance as the 21st century unfolds. These two positions--roughly representing forces of choice vs. forces of control--are where the action is, and will be, for a long time to come.

In his original formulation, Jonah claimed that libertarians espouse a form of "arrogant nihilism" and that John Walker's participation in a retrograde fundamentalist regime was "a logical consequence" of such a misguided "political agenda." He wrote, "According to cultural libertarianism, we should all start believing in absolutely nothing, until we find whichever creed or ideology fits us best. We can pick from across the vast menu of human diversity — from all religions and cultures, real and imagined — until we find one that fits our own personal preferences."

He is not, I think, particularly mistaken in emphasizing libertarianism's interest in what he derisively terms "Chinese-menu culture" and "designer cultures." I'd argue, in fact, that all cultures are precisely admixtures put together by individuals to serve their particular needs and ends. No one questions that "cultures"--an imprecise term at best--change over time and in response to the demands of the people comprising them. Consider Roman Catholicism, which I alluded to at the start of this piece: Despite official claims to a consistent, unbroken, and self-evident tradition dating back to the first century A.D., the plain fact is that a Catholic from 1901 would barely recognize today's church as his own. Things change, and in response to specific and ongoing, if not always articulate, demands.

One of the defining characteristics of contemporary America and the modern world writ large is that more individuals have the means and motivation to insist on a "culture" that reflects their particular needs and sensibilities. Jonah ridicules this as underwriting such apparently clear absurdities as "Buddhists for Jesus" (as if Christianity itself had no precursor forms that violated existing categories). Dictating the limits of culture used to be the province of small, typically aristocratic elites, who could enforce their vision on the masses. Nowadays, that ability is effectively becoming decentralized, the result being a proliferation of standards, not a flight from them. This trend, which I've written about at length in terms of creative expression, frustrates and frightens conservatives and other gatekeepers who prize stability and hierarchy, for they mistake it as an end to standards.

Where Jonah is absolutely wrong, however, is to assert that an appreciation for this dynamic is tantamount to nihilism. To suggest that is to argue that tolerance is nihilism. It isn't: Tolerance, particularly in a libertarian framework, is grounded in respect for individuals as equal and autonomous agents, as long as they recognize others' similar standing--the right to swing one's fist ends at my nose and all that. Tolerance is a universal principle that underwrites all sorts of local differences. To believe in tolerance is manifestly not to believe in nothing.

Which is precisely why F.A. Hayek, in his widely read essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative," placed tolerance at the heart of a truly liberal--or, properly, libertarian--order. In his column titled "The Libertarian Lie," Jonah makes great hay over the fact that Hayek explicitly rejected the term "libertarian," calling it "singularly unattractive." There's no question Hayek dissed the particular word, claiming that "it carries too much the flavor of the manufactured term and of a substitute." Yet he unreservedly embraced the substance of it, too, talking repeatedly about "the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution." "The liberal," wrote Hayek, "is aware that it is of the essence of human achievement that it produces something new; and he is prepared to come to terms with new knowledge, whether he likes its immediate effects or not." This seems to me much more a description of "cultural libertarianism" than of National Review conservatism, which seems to groan at every change in women's status, say, or every new development in genetic engineering.

The contested role of Hayek in this is worth lingering over, less because Hayek is some sort of high priest with divine insight and more because the appeals made in his name demonstrate core beliefs of his petitioners. At the heart of the Hayekian project, as I quoted in my earlier rejoinder to Jonah, is a belief that "to live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one's concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends." For Hayek, such tolerance had a strong instrumental component: He argued for a maximally defined private, "protected sphere," one free of all sorts of coercion, because it allows for decentralized experiments in living through which individuals and groups gain meaningful knowledge and social institutions evolve. Elsewhere, he defined a free society as one in which individuals "could at least attempt to shape their own li[ves], where [they] gained the opportunity of knowing and choosing different forms of life." To limit choices, for Hayek, was to risk impoverishing a robust "extended order."

Hayek's insistence on the necessary limits of human knowledge similarly distances him from contemporary conservatives, who typically sound a very different tone in their proclamations. "The liberal is very much aware that we do not know all the answers and that he is not sure that the answers he has are certainly the right ones or even that we can find all the answers," wrote Hayek. At another point, Hayek, true to his Humean roots, notes that "in some respects the liberal fundamentally a skeptic." Compare these positively postmodern emphases on the limits of knowledge to Jonah's exasperation that "to the cultural libertarian, all authoritative cultural norms should be scrutinized again and again" (emphasis in the original).

Jonah is right to note that the "conservatives" specifically alluded to in Hayek's title are "conservatives in the European tradition (de Maistre, Coleridge, et al)," yet he merely ignores the question of whether that brand of conservatism is a part of his own. Hayek may well have noted, as Jonah writes, "that United States was the one place in the world where you could call yourself a 'conservative' and be a lover of liberty" because of America's peculiar past as a liberal nation. Yet that doesn't mean that all aspects of U.S. conservatism are classically liberal. Hayek notes that conservatives have a reflexive "distrust of the new and strange," essentially a fear of change.

This calls to mind Jonah's argument against another "cultural libertarian," Andrew Sullivan, who supports gay marriage. Titled, "Patience, Andrew, Patience: The Case for Temperamental Conservatism," the column seems an illustration of Hayek's idea that conservatism, "by its very nature cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but...it cannot prevent their continuance." Jonah essentially grants that gay marriage will come one day--a concession that no conservative would have made 30 years ago--but that we should just hold off on it for the time being. (Click here to read the explicitly Hayekian case for gay marriage I made in Reason some five years ago.)

Regardless of where or whether Hayek fits into all this, there can be little question that libertarians and conservatives break sharply over issues of choice vs. control, with libs opting for more of the former in all areas of human activity and conservatives emphasizing the latter, whether the topic is gay marriage, biotech, or drug use. There can be little question that we are facing increasing choice--not simply in economic but cultural and social terms, too, where the "Chinese menu" has exploded into a wide-ranging buffet. Anthropologist Grant McCracken has observed what he terms "plenitude," or the "quickening speciation" of social groups, gender types and lifestyles. "Where once there was simplicity and limitation ... there is now social difference, and that difference proliferates into ever more diversity, variety, heterogeneity," writes McCracken in 1997's "Plenitude."

For conservatives, such thoroughgoing choice is problematic, whether we're talking politics or culture, because it allows for unregulated experimentation ("Buddhists for Jesus"). Jonah notes that "personal liberty is vitally important. But it isn't everything. If you emphasize personal liberty over all else, you undermine the development of character and citizenship" and all forms of "established authority."

Maybe, maybe not. This much is certain, though: Such an understanding misses the key point that individual liberty is the starting point of "established authority," whether political, social, or cultural. Reeling off a list of "the ingredients for Western civilization," Jonah counts, "Christianity and religion in general, sexual norms, individualism, patriotism, the Canon, community of standards, democracy, the rule of law, fairness, modesty, self-denial, and the patriarchy." All of these things are under construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction on a daily basis, as different individuals opt in or out. But they all require buy-in from individuals too, even if the choice, as it often is, is to bind oneself to particular rules and conventions.

"Choosing determines all human action," wrote a different Austrian economist (and Hayek's mentor), Ludwig von Mises. "In making his choice, man chooses not only between various materials and services. All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another."

To understand that basic reality is not, pace Jonah, to "encourage the dismantling of the soapboxes [libertarians] stand on." Rather, it is the best and perhaps only way to maintain a flourishing culture.

Re: Chaos leads directly to totolitarianism / dictatorship !

The history of totalitarianism is actually quite the opposite. It takes a lot of planning to even conceive of a totalitarian order. Chaos may be used as a tactic to tear down the old order, but the goal of all totalitarian/dictatorial mindsets is to create order (albeit conforming to the ego of the central planner(s) involved). The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.

As to libertarianism, it's no threat to the course of our political evolution. Republics decay into democracies, democracies decay into socialism, socialism advances to even more coercive regimes (communist, fascist). Hopefully there will be a few classical liberals around to start a new republic when needed and when conditions are right (the tree of liberty is in drought and all we do is piss on it). The libertarians have seen their day in the sun, and now mostly serve as an interesting contrast to the useful dialectic of conservative/liberal, republican/democrat, left/right. A re-born Republic is not likely though, as the coercive control mechanisms are now based more on fraud than force, more on mind control than physical control. As a consequence, we are raising a new nation that is fast becoming economically, diagnostically, culturally, didactically, spiritually and politically illiterate. Lest we be too smug, the great battles were already lost by those who should have been more virtuous and more on guard much earlier in this century.

This thread has been most illuminating. May God save the Republic, because it's pretty obvious we aren't capable of doing it ourselves.

How old are you ? Do you have any children ? Have you EVER studied the history of American education; on the graduate level ?

Explain to me, HOW there will suddenly be enough schools, for ALL public school children, the day AFTER Libertarians close down ALL public schools. Tell me, WHO the teachers and administraters would be ; bearin in mind, that ALL Of the public school teachers are now unemployed. If / when the replacement school open , and the tuition, books, etc. cost MORE tan what most people can / are willing to pay for ( even with NO taxation at all ! ) , where will those children go to be taught, and what will happen to the schools which won't be able to pay the bills ?

Free Markets providing THE best of everything ? WHEN ? WHERE ? Do you NOT know, that prior to the PURE FOOD AND DRUG BILLS, that tainted meat, falsified butter, impure and watered milk , contaminated cans of all mater of food, and drugs / palliatives, load with alcohol, cocaie, heroin, and opium was the NORM , and made MORE peopele sick / killed them, than AFTER the PF&D Acts were put into law ? Your theory sounds wonderful; the facts contradict what you have claimed would now happen.

You claim that children, from now non-existent public schools would be placed into the grades, where they would fit. REALLY? Their parents, who think that little Jihnny is brilliant, because his public school techers keep passing him with As, are going to be willing to have him ledt back two or three grades?

Well, if there is mass overcrowding like you claim, then little Johnny's parents would put him in any available school, right? Of course, little Johnny's parents in this example seem to give a damn about his education, in which case they wouldn't rely on the benevolent government youth propoganda representative, who says that their son is so smart - he gets straight A's. It might occur to these parents, upon hearing from the new math teacher (who, to their amazement, actually knows how to do math instead of math pedagogy) that the fact that Johhnie thinks that 2+2=9 is a true representation of his math skills (as opposed to the inflated representation that he had so as not to hurt his self-esteem). Armed with this new information, they'd be happy to put Johnny back a few grades so that he won't have to hunt for the cheeseburger picture key on the McDonald's cash register to make change for a dollar.

Looks like I can answer fear speculation with more speculation.

Functionally illiterate parents should home school their kids?

I think this is a myth. Home schooling produces test scores in the 80th and 90th percentile, but as if this was not amazing enough, it produces these scores regardless of the factors that affect performance in public schools. For example, in a public school, the education level of the parents of the students determines the performance of the student, while the gap is almost nill for students in home schools. This is particularly amazing given that the high-school dropout, the high school graduate, and the college graduate ARE THE TEACHERS of the home schooled students, and they still outperform the public school teachers hands down. I don't buy the illiterate parent fear mongering.

I have just explained to you, that there is NO room for them in existing private schools!

But does that make it so? My ideas and your ideas are, after all, just ideas.

Public schooled are YOU?

Yes, and I feel lucky to have gotten out with the little that I did. To this day I don't know how it is that I was able to come out of there and go on to graduate college with an engineering degree.

So, you assume that in a free market , suddenly schools would appear ; as if by magic?

No, they'd appear (supply) due to the phenomenon known as demand. I think dasboot beat me to it on this answer.

And WHOM would start and teach in these schools ? Why, the very teachers who now teach in public schools , of course.

Shouldn't it be WHO instead of WHOM? (grammar alert). I'm just staying true to my form. No, not necessarily the same teachers from the public schools at all. In fact, hopefully not some of these teachers. Many public school teachers, although they are 'certified' and hold teaching degrees, don't know a damn about what they're teaching. I, for example, hold no teaching degree, but being fluent in Spanish, would teach any kid better than any spanish teacher I ever had when I was in school (my teachers used to make up words that didn't exist, no joke).

Parents would actually have to pay for it all.

Yes, like they're paying for it now (albeit discreetly), and getting negative return.

What you don't understand, is that public schools use not only local taxes, but Fed funds as well, to pay for things. Now, under a Libertarian government, there would be NO Fed and NO local tax monies. Not only that, but NO buildings, no books, no compters, no desks, no science equipment; in short ... NO NOTHING !

Yes, I do understand that the Feds are also involved. If anyone knows, it's a libertarian! They have no authority to be involved! Yes, there would be no tax monies, no computers, desks, oh my God! We're all going to die!

I've noticed that taxes do not go to buy buildings, trucks, freezers, meat slicers (In short....NO NOTHING! ) and the like so that we can have supermarkets.

Now I'm getting a bit tired of picking apart this response line by line. I can answer speculation with speculation and fear with reason all day, but all of this is simply a question of implementation. Like I said before, I'm not at all convinced that an instantaneous change would be the best way to proceed, so from that standpoint you're preaching to the half-converted!

Do I know how to change it, and TRUELY improve it ? YOU BET I DO , and it is NOT the way you and Libertaians want to thoughtlessly do it !

You've said this many times before, and I've already asked for your suggestions, so why are you keeping me waiting? I would sincerely like to hear your specific suggestions, contrary to what you've stated ("you and your ilk will refuse to even consider IF I just might be correct"). If I wouldn't consider good ideas, why would I be on this site in the first place? Everybody be quiet! Let's hear what nopardons has to say!

In America, we have a federal goverment, state governments, county and parish goverments and a variety of community governments; not a borderless Libertarian hegemony

No! Don't you see? It's the great Leviathan against us!

For the purposes of our discussion (the function of government in public education) the government serves as the accurate general term. That is to say, the FEDS, state, local gubmints all take your money by force and give it over to the public schools, whether or not you use them, and whether or not the schools perform. Hence they do the same thing on different levels, and this was the point of our discussion. Referring to any of these levels of government, that perform the same function as far as we're concerned here, as 'the government' by no means makes me a conspiratorial nut, but if you need another strawman to poke fun at so as to avoid a real discussion of ideas, go right ahead.

Do you tell people that you took your Ford car or your Chevy car to the store, instead of the generic term 'car'?

How much force could an LP government use against communities that resisted orders to shut down their schools?

Already answered that 'question' in a previous post, after which, instead of taking issue with my response, you ran off onto the "THE" government strawman. I might say that your asking that question shows that 1. You clearly do not understand libertarianism and that 2. You don't seem to understand how our schools work.

FIrstly, I do NOT speculate about things regarding education, I KNOW ABOUT THEM !

Private schools, are under NO obligation, to take ill qualified applicants. The good ones, are far too expensive , even with NO taxation, for those in public school to attend. Private schools know exactly how many studenst will be attending their school, come the start of the school year, and have NO openings, for displaced public school kids. Your theorizing / speculations ; therefore, are not only from a totally ignorant position, but incorrect at EVERY step of the way.

The close of every public school, without warning, would not only engender utter chaos, as far as the children are concerned, it would also cause a serious ecconomic problem. It takes longer, to find a building, hire teachers, buy supplies ( you STILL haven't said where THAT money would come from ! ) , and sign up students, than you suspect. A free market is NO answer to the question. You aren't familar with schools, teaching methods, nor the opperation of schools. Even IF It would only take a few months ( doubtful ) , the displaced public school children would be in limbo. Don't, for a moment, believe that all of the parents would home school those children. Unfortunately, quite a number of the effected parents, n matter WHAT you say about those now being home schooled, would be incapable of dealing with doing that. Remember, there are NOT motivated to do it now; they wouldn't be motivated to do so in this hypothetical case.

The fired teachers, would be EXACTLY those, who would be again teaching in the new schools. I doubt that YOU will quit your present job, and teach them. So, even WITH a free market ( and I am a free marekteer ) , this is a zero sum game, and a straw man argument from you.

What would I do to fix public education ? Go back to the way it was , from 1900 through 1940 . Throw out All of the programs, ow extant in education departments, and reintroduce Normal School methodology. Burn ALL of the current math, English, and history texts, and use the ones, from the above era. Remove EVERY " diversity progran, ALL " touchy / feely " crap , and reintroduce geography, and history ( as TWO distinct classes ) , bring back the teaching of economics, at the high school level, AND the GREAT BOOKS series. No more " HEATHER HAS TWO MOMMIES", at all.

Use ONLY English emmertion classes, and close EVERY ESL program down completely. Uncouple the mainstreaming programs, and get the emotionally disturbed, extremely disabled, and the menally retarded OUT of every school, and every classroom. Put those children back into highly specialized schools of their own.

Reintroduce being left back, skipping, doing three years of middle school, in two, and put back into place the OLD birthday cut offs. Little boys, are now being held back, for NO reason , except that the kindergarten and first grade teachers, are ill prepared to handle them, now.

I'd also get rid of the UNIONS; however , that can't be done in any legal maner.

IN the " bad old days ", and yes, they were NOT as " good " as those who know only fantasy history think they were , there were many problem schools, and problem children. Most of them were in rural areas, NOT in big cities; surprisingly enough.

Now, about FR. In certain circumstances, yes, this IS very much an " old boys / girls " place. The reason for that is, most newbies no longer take the time to read the archieves anymore, just read the threads, and get to know who is who, and what is what BEFORE they throw themselves into posting. Newbies now accuse other posters of believing something that they don't / being what they aren't, without any justification. They ( YOU ) are also far ruder , when replying, than most " oldtimers " are; though, when trashed, they ( I ) will give back in kind.

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