...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.

I knew Tom Paine. Tom Paine was a friend of mine. And you, sir, are no Tom Paine. :)

Why is it that I'm always wanting to know how old people on this site are, particularly libertarians? I remember libertarianism being wildly attractive when I was eighteen-- now that I'm 42 and a mother of teenagers, it just isn't nearly so interesting. I was perfectly content to watch my friends collect Darwin awards, but somehow I'm less sanguine about the prospect of my children doing so. Ah, too soon old, too late smart.

Sound pretty libertarian to me.

Nope, conservative, in that I recognize the fact that human nature, being what it is, is to go in the opposite direction of liberty without accountability. If the opposite were true, there would be no need for laws of any kind. That is the missing element in the libertarian philosophy, they always assume that human beings are, as a species, rugged individualists and that is just not the case.

Gillespie has published nasty little anti-Catholic pieces under a pseudonym for the satire site suck.com. Like Jonah, he's much a buffoon at times. Jonah, at least, doesn't attack his own heritage, and doesn't make a point of tearing down the religion of others.

Gillespie's world view has little to do with "tolerance" and much more to do with liberation through transgression. Perhaps "liberation" is too strong a word. It's just the throwing off of an heritage. "Tolerance" is a much more complicated concept with many more ironies and pitfalls than you can find in Nick Gillespie's view of the world.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. In what way does the drug policy you describe differ from the libertarian drug policy?

In what way does the drug policy you describe differ from the libertarian drug policy?

There is no "libertarian" drug policy there is a libertarian stance on what that policy should be. The drug policy the libertarians espouse can never be implemented in this country without inevitably becoming a liberal playground of drug treatment and victimization. The drug issue is just a minute example of why the libertarian "solution" to governing would end with a liberal outcome. The only way to have a libertarian society is to put into place a rigid "social Darwinism" that once in effect would cause a massive backlash.

Try millenia. Morality laws, have been in place, in all counties and cultures, from time immemorial. Those who claim otherwise, don't know history. Man is NOT inherrently "good" nor moral. There NEVER was a Rousseauian " Noble Savage", and those who trn ablind and jaundiced eye, to those they disagree with, but allow to indulge in any manner of behaviors, are the ones, who must ignore consequence of actions in order to do so.

Libertarians are NOT Conservatives . Consrvatives and Libertarains are NOT compatable. The Libertarians who say , well yes, the LP platform and I don't agree on this, this, this, and THIS, but I am STILL a Libertarian ; fool themselves. Outside of this forum, the vast majority of Conservatives don't even know anything at all about the LP, nor LIbertarains. Once people here actually find out about the LP, and come face to face ( so to speak ) with Libertarians , they don't like what they see ! In REAL LIFE, the LP is shrinking ; NOT growing !

Historically, no matter what the Libertarians like to claim, this country was NOT formed on Libertarian philosophy ! The Libertarian movenment, cherrypicked what they liked / absconded with / purloined certain theories / philosophies from the past, welded this onto a far, far, FAR leftist bunch of things, and came up with Libertarianism. There is far MORE compatabilty with the GREENIES and Libertarias, than between the GOPers and Libertarians.

There ARE consiquence for ALL actions. If a society is " used " to one thing, and all of a sudden that mode of governance way of life is elimnated, chaos runs rampent. Incrimentalism is how we all arrived at this pont, and incrimentalism is the ONLY way, that can be used, to extricate us from the mess. UPTOPIANISM has always been, and is a pipe dream. Libertarianism IS a UTOPIAN pipe dream; nothing more !

Then, thee are those Randians, who believe that " ATLAS SHRUGGD " is a viable roadmap, of how things can and should be. WRONG ! The ONLY book of FICTION which has EVER changed a culture, ad that in a VERY miniscule way, is Dickens' " A CHRISTMAS CAROL " !

The drug policy the libertarians espouse can never be implemented in this country without inevitably becoming a liberal playground of drug treatment and victimization. The drug issue is just a minute example of why the libertarian "solution" to governing would end with a liberal outcome. The only way to have a libertarian society is to put into place a rigid "social Darwinism" that once in effect would cause a massive backlash.

But how is it any different from what you described as liberty with accountability in relation to drugs?

This week, as Congress and Bush push through the latest education reform, I've been thinking a lot about the differences between "conservatives" and libertarians.

Check out this link

http://www.newsmax.com/commentarchive.shtml?a=2001/8/10/143946

For the record, I think it's a bit of a stretch to assert that libertarians follow liberals more closely than conservatives; however it seems to me that part of the problem is one of labels. That is, today's 'conservative' doesn't seem to me to be what 'conservative' was during the Reagan presidency. People are so anxious to identify libertarians in terms of the limited vocabulary , "right" or "left", terms that are themselves not clearly defined, that ultimately all attempts to properly identify them fail.

Excelant comparative analysis of conservative, libertarian, and the so called liberal. I especially note your last sentence;

I do have a problem with a movement that wants to give us a "libertarian" solution but end up with a "liberal" outcome.

No doubt your concern is very legitimate. In politics, as you seem to be quite aware of, compromise is always the first likely outcome, and is never fully predictable. Prudence would say, that one cannot just plan for the desired ends, but must also plan for the likely compromised ends. This you seem to be doing with a high degree of political awareness. (I'm not making a tong in cheek sneak attack this time.)

Liberals face this same fundamental problem. Liberals see themselves as being in the service of all individuals, not just the majority. As Galbraith put it, defending the free enterprise system must also include defending the "least amongst us." To do this they realize that a certain amount of authoritarianism is unavoidable. They can thus compromise with selected special interests (of which some will include anti free enterprise neo-Marxists), but will ensure that the "least amongst us" are not forgotten, or they can compromise with the conservatives, who will trade off every possible protection for the "least amongst us" as well as the free enterprise system itself in favor of monopoly capitalism, which in turn will diminish the liberal ranks, as Marxists draw off those being left behind.

Since I have ALWAYS been a Conservative ( which predates the formation of the LP, by decades ! ) , your reply doesn't apply to me. Just as there is right and wrong, there is also right and left ! Yes, almost everyone is a combinaion of of right and left ( as in shades of grey); however , modeatsare just " roadkill ', as they say. LOL

OTOH, those who are so mired in an inflexable position, will NEVER attain anything that they desire. There is no such thing , as " instant gratification " , when one talks about a political wish list. Only spoiled children demand things be done / given immediately. Libertarians, for the most part, look at a 1/2 full glass, and see it as being empty.

I have this tremendous urge to get in, nit pick and rip your reply #22 apart. The problem is that your reply is so well written and full of well placed truisms, that I think every word of it holds a certain truth. I should just like to repeate your last paragraph, which so well concluding your entire reply.

Gee-- the product of a religious impulse, or obnoxious? Your choice. For what it's worth, many intelligent people under 30 think that they discovered libertarianism all by themselves and no one has ever understood it before. By the time one reaches middle age, its limitations have become apparent.

I hope their are libertarians at FR who read the entire reply of yours, and were able to chuckle a little at themselves, before getting back to the task at hand.

I don't care so much about liberal and conservative labels. Either you are for freedom and liberty or you are against them and that's what's really important. Our country got along just great without gun controls, social welfare programs, drug prohibitions, income taxes, farm subsidies, foreign interventionism and a myriad of other unAmerican policies for nearly 150 years.

Regarding immigration though I will concede that the Libertarians are hopelessly out of touch.

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