...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.

Oh brother ! You claim to have wanted to talk about one thing, and then, blame ME, because I didn't bring it up ? I wouldn't have brought it up, even if I had complied with your nonsensical request to type the ENTIRE history, of education , in this country. GIVE ME A BREAK !

YOU WANTED TO DISCUSS SOMETHING ? YOU DISCUSS IT. YOU DON'T WAIT FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO BRING THAT TOPIC UP !

You asked me to talk about someting, and then, when I give you a few brief ( well, as brief as I coud make it ) paragraphs, YOU accuse me of writing diatribes , and being " off topic " ? GIVE IT A REST !

You posted INACCURATE info, and when I correct what YOU said, YOU get huffy, and accuse ME of trying to prove my intelligence ? I DO ENJOY A BATTLE OF WITS, BUT HATE FIGHTING THE LIKES OF YOU, WHO COME TO IT, UNARMED !

A small suggestion ... DON'T TRY TO DISCUSS THAT WHICH YOU KNOW ALMOST NOTHING ABOUT !

I am disappointed that you resort to the term "statist" given your past civility in defending your libertarian philosophy.

*BOGGLE* Even Clinton confined himself to quibbling over the definitions of accepted words, and did not go so far as to assert that certain words should simply never be spoken.

There are two stated positions that libertarians have in common with conservatives, the 2nd amendment and taxes/economics. That is where the similarity ends.

Nonsense -- unless you are going to tell me that conservatives reject the rule of law, embrace various forms arbitrary privilege, oppose military response to attacks on our soil, support world government,... well, I could continue for several pages, but I think the point is made.

the fact remains that in any civilized society there are those that are in positions of authority based on the privilege granted them by the members of the society who wish to maintain the cultural norms that make up that society hence the term "conservative"

There are always those who think that that public virtue can spring from the pronouncements of some political leader, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. The notion that it is possible to get something by simply demanding it, rather than doing the hard work of producing it, is seductive. Every nation so seduced becomes one with Nineveh and Tyre.

Nanny Statist; yup , that's my nopardons.

At the banquet table of political ideas, we actually select many of the same entrees; but while I like to invite others to eat of my particular favorites, nopardons bends them over and S.I.U.T.A...[gives involuntary suppository.]

May I place her name with those other luminaries in your hall of fame?

You can't have it both ways.

"You physicists told me that it boiled down to some simple equations, like F=ma and F=Gm1m2/r^2. Now, all of a sudden, you give us all this complicated 'rocket science'. Which is it?"

There are always those who think that that public virtue can spring from the pronouncements of some political leader,

While I agree with what you said what does that have to do with what I said?

The notion that it is possible to get something by simply demanding it, rather than doing the hard work of producing it, is seductive.

Hence the ingrained, consistent failure of the Libertarian Party.

There are many libertarians on this site that honor the "rule of law" so long as they agree with the law in question, otherwise they just self-declare the law to be unconstitutional and assert that it does not apply to them. There are several libertarians on this site that do not think our actions since 911 are justified even though we were attacked on our own soil. There are many libertarians on this site that , through their support for open borders, are in fact supporting a world government.

*BOGGLE* Even Clinton confined himself to quibbling over the definitions of accepted words, and did not go so far as to assert that certain words should simply never be spoken.

I did not attempt to censor the word, however it is used to denigrate any non-libertarian that dares post on this site along with Nazi, Fascist or any other knee-jerk epithet that their teenage minds can conjure up.

I have hear them argue in exactly this way many,many times.

against real, tangible evidence that such things as drugs and prostitution harm both individuals and society, the libertarian will hold up only the inviolable value of personal freedom

You're misrepresenting the opposition's argument again. You are required to demonstrate that you have defined both "harm to individuals" and "harm to society" in such a way that prohibition of either or both cannot support totalitarian maternalism.

Libertarians have solved the problem by requring non-consensuality as a requirement for state-actionable "harm to individuals" and reducing allegations of "harm to society" to its component "harm to individuals". I'm still waiting for conservatives to come up with something.

I agree wholeheartedly with your post on how you would fix the public schools.
Your methods are well thought out and make sense, and would go along way to restoring sound education to the children who are afterall, the leaders of the future.
If only this could be done, I would breathe a lot easier, and worry less about the fate of the children who are being passed on in school without even the basic reading skills!
Bravo! I nominate you for School Czar!

If you wand a "magic wand", and did away with EVERYTHING that the LP claims to want / hold dear , chaos would be an uptick.

This is a moot point, since it applies to all political parties. If there were a magic wand that could instantly switch national policy between the Democratic and Republican platforms, the economy would collapse as $N*10^8 was instantly transferred from one party's friends to the other's, regulations were suddenly imposed or lifted en masse, etc.

Both of these statements are true if one substitutes "conservative" for "libertarian". You're simply proving my point.

There are many libertarians on this site that , through their support for open borders, are in fact supporting a world government.

Non Sequitur Society: We Don't Make Sense, But We Do Like Pizza.

Both of these statements are true if one substitutes "conservative" for "libertarian". You're simply proving my point.

Really? Show me where conservatives are saying those things. You have a very strange way of making your point.

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