From Bo Winegard.
the timeless truths and principles at the heart of conservative ideology: (1) Humans are flawed creatures; (2) Reason is powerful but limited and prone to error; (3) Utopian thinking is dangerous, especially when combined with ideologies that promote concentrated political power; (4) Humans should respect tradition and custom; and (5) Intuition is an important guide to social policy.
I did not find his discussion of #5 compelling. But the first four are comparable to the summary of conservatism that you will find in Jerry Muller’s anthology. Libertarians naturally reject (4). When they reject (1) and (2), they also gravitate toward utopianism.
“Libertarians naturally reject (4).”
And until the libertarians can show a consistent record of creating successful cultures and sustainable liberal governments, then I will naturally reject their ideas and will rely heavily on tradition and customs. How are things going over in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Do I understand this correctly that you are being serious in using the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan as implementations of libertarianism?
The libertarians are correct in being skeptical of social and governmental transformations on foreign soil. But, when it comes to domestic soil, they tend towards utopianism. Open borders…no problem. Drug legalization…let’s do it. Free trade…why not?
I think that Arnold is wrong here. Libertarians understand spontaneous order, so we would start with the assumption that a given custom or tradition exists for a reason.
Growing up the main reason to be a libertarian rather than a conservative was drugs and sex. Especially sex. There was a very strong opinion that the old moral hangups around sex were a tradition that made absolutely no sense and should be discarded.
If you believe traditional attitudes about sex, what exactly does libertarianism bring to the table that you can’t get in conservatism.
You’re confusing small “L” libertarians with members of the Libertarian Party. Yes, LP members tend to favor drug legalization because they want to do drugs. Small “L” libertarians favor legalization because we think that prohibition causes more problems than it solves.
Small “L” libertarians differ from conservatives on many issues. We tend be more liberal on immigration and social issues, for example.
A big area of disagreement is foreign affairs. Conservatives generally agree with us that, domestically, government is incapable of doing much more than maintaining stability, “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.” Yet at the same time, conservatives seem to believe that that same bumbling government is entirely able to micromanage other nations.
Foreign policy seems to defy easy conservative/liberal axis. For instance, its clear that opposition to the Iraq War and foreign entanglements is a big part of whatever Trump was about. Meanwhile, the Dems have somehow morphed into a party that would probably favor something like Vietnam (they certainly don’t want to leave our current engagements and are fine meddling in other affairs).
Immigration is a weird issue because immigration is very tied up with the welfare state. Both because immigrants receive welfare and immigrants vote for welfare. Even Ron Paul and Milton Friedman didn’t engage in Caplan level idiocy on this point.
I noticed you dodged the issue of sexual morality. When I converted from a libertarian to a conservative, sexual morality was the biggest part of it.
I’m not sure what the libertarian “line” is on sexual morality. Personally, I don’t care if you want to marry your vacuum cleaner. All I ask is to not be forced to affirm, celebrate, or subsidize your marriage.
P.S. I used to be anti drug war but this changed when I realized that crime is primarily driven by something other than drug profits. I could be talked into some pragmatic decriminalization arguments on certain drugs, but overall I find the libertarian obsession with the drug war counter productive to public order.
Growing up, I’d say libertarianism was pro-promiscuity. Promiscuity was the reason to be libertarian instead of conservative. Libertarians talk a lot about polyamory and the libertarian convention in 2016 featured a lot of dudes getting naked and I think the runner up had a harem of South American prostitutes or something (one of which tried to kill him).
When I became anti-promiscuity I gave up being libertarian. Similarly since the gay male lifestyle is so tied up in promiscuity I became less enthused with gay marriage, seeing it as mostly about affirming promiscuity.
Are you thinking of “libertine” rather than libertarian?
Richard,
Your side clearly has a messaging problem. Lower case this, upper case that, ine vs. arian. Ok to marry a vacuum. Etc.
And, then you wonder why people, particularly traditional families who want to raise their kids in a good environment, have no desire to entertain your philosophy.
Wow. I guess another difference between conservatives and libertarians is that libertarians have a sense of humor.
This part I don’t understand. You can disagree with how high the barrier should be in dismissing tradition, but tradition and habit are essential to a Hayekian view. If individuals can’t guess the workings of the market by themselves, why should individuals — proceeding from pure reason — feel free to denigrate tradition? If your argument is it depends, then you’re a conservative, but you’re just arguing about the details.
All of these timeless truths are perfectly compatible with white supremacy.
I consider myself a libertarian, but I see it as more of a direction than a set of policy prescriptions. For example, I would like to see more school choice and fewer occupational licensing laws. I am in favor of merit-based immigration. However, I do not believe that flooding the U.S. with unskilled workers is in our best interest.
That said, I agree with Hans that his caricature of an ideal libertarian state “open borders, no drug laws, completely unfettered trade” would be both unworkable and undesirable.
Hans, I do wonder what your caricature of an ideal conservative state would look like?
“I do wonder what your caricature of an ideal conservative state would look like?”
As requested, here is the caricature of the ideal conservative state: A roving band of feeble minded white supremacists that spread terror to and fro throughout the land and refuse to wear face masks.
Your take on libertarianism sounds fairly mainstream conservative. Sorry. What’s in the libertarian secret sauce that somehow differentiates it from conservatism? Well, it’s pretty much all of the “caricatures” that I mentioned. Shrooms anyone…I mean Reason actually had an entire issue of the magazine dedicated to this one silly topic.
During this time of trying to re-establish unity, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few libertarianish authors that could help bridge the gap between thoughtful conservatives and thoughtful libertarians:
Jim Manzi (“Uncontrolled”)
Tim Harford (“Adapt”)
Jeffrey Friedman
With these authors, I see 1) a healthy dose of skepticism towards the technocrats and 2) an emphasis on small scale experiments as a means of making meaningful and incremental changes. These are ideas that I can support.
Hans, here are a couple of differences:
Libertarians are wary of laws like the Patriot Act.
Libertarians are opposed to military adventurism.
Libertarians actually believe in balancing the federal budget.
“Libertarians are wary of laws like the Patriot Act.”
The number one civil rights issue of our time is government imposed lockdowns, which were never proven safe and effective against the virus. The libertarians mostly went AWOL. A few brave conservatives (Kemp, DeSantis, Abbott, etc.) decided to try something different.
“Libertarians are opposed to military adventurism”
As you know, a significant portion of conservative thought has always been against voluntary military interventions. Historically, we were called “isolationists,” but our views are the norm now.
“Libertarians actually believe in balancing the federal budget”
So do fiscal conservatives like myself. Collectively, our views on this topic are in the minority and have been since the early 00s. We are completely doomed on Medicare obligations alone and GWB and Trump did zero to help in this regard.
Libertarians are AWOL on the COVID lockdowns? Jeez. Have you ever heard of Cato, “Reason” magazine, or the Foundation for Economic Education? Or go to Cafe Hayek. Every day, Don Boudreaux rails against the lockdowns and provides links to articles by others doing the same.
“Libertarians are AWOL on the COVID lockdowns?”
That’s what I said. Please send over the article links from Cato or Reason. I’m indifferent as to what FEE or Cafe Hayek were saying…looking for the larger audience libertarian stuff.
And, actually governing and ending the worst parts of the lockdowns as conservatives have done takes a lot more courage than writing an opinion piece.
You can google “cato covid lockdown” as easily as I can. As to governing, your point is well taken, but a prerequisite for governing is to get into government. Despite the myth that libertarians have been in charge of the world for the last 30 years, the reality is that there are very few libertarians in power.
Maybe this is just me, but Cowen seems like the most mainstream libertarian of the GMU crowd, and he seemed at least somewhat pro lockdown to me. I’ll grant you that he tries to Straussian his way to not taking a stance on anything.
With libertarians I think a lot of the work is what they emphasize in their advocacy. So for Caplan I’d say the only issues that really matters with him is immigration. The rest is an irrelevant sideshow. He has other views, but its not what people think about him.
I never got the impression that libertarians emphasized and acted upon fundamental opposition to the lockdowns. I’ve seen lockdown protestors plenty, there were a lot of them having lots of protests in lots of place all the time. I didn’t see a lot of academic libertarians in the crowd. If it mattered to them as much as it theoretically should, shouldn’t they have been there? Why wasn’t Caplan blogging about his Friday evening out protesting the fact that willing service providers weren’t allowed to provide services to willing customers? Emphasis and how you spend you time and political capital is what shows what you care about. Libertarians just didn’t care as much about the lockdowns as ordinary conservatives/populists.
“I never got the impression that libertarians emphasized and acted upon fundamental opposition to the lockdowns.”
The government lockdowns were the once in a lifetime chance for the libertarians to demonstrate their civil liberty bona fides…and they basically whiffed. Most of the heavy lifting against the lockdowns has been done by red governors and conservatives like Dr. Scott Atlas. The Great Barrington Declaration, which was very late to the game, would maybe be one exception to this…but, mostly crickets from the rest of the libertarian intellectual class.
Meanwhile, they focus their efforts on ending qualified immunity, adding social workers to policing and seeking reforms as to how many knocks need to be made at the door during felony warrants. These are the kinds of stuff that won’t move the needle one iota.
The ideal conservative state of today would be Israel or Singapore. They both cherish their ethnic, racial, linguistic identities and birth inheritance.
“(2) Reason is powerful but limited and prone to error”
In the case of Bo Winegard, this is obviously true, but this sounds like permission to forego reason for something far worse
To understand that reason is limited is not to reject it. I know, for example, that my eyes aren’t perfect – I can’t see microscopic objects or distant galaxies, for example – but that doesn’t lead me to pluck out my eyeballs.
Understanding that our abilities are limited lends a bit of humility to libertarians and conservatives. We don’t, for example, believe that we can spend people’s money on their behalf better than they can, nor do we assume that we know how to regulate or replace entire industries.
I think this quote from G. K Chesterton explains conservatism pretty well:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
Since the pandemic lockdowns began, I have a joke I call “Chesterton’s Utility” which relates to all the unexpected things that start to go wrong when everybody is teleworking all the time.
At first many people think, “Well, everyone already spends 99.9% of their days working in a mostly individualized way behind keyboards and screens, what does it really matter if they are all packed together in cubes or spread out across the metro? Some people already telework some of the time, so what’s the big deal of just throttling that up to most people, most of the time?”
People will say there are adequate substitutes, “Well, if you prefer hard copies, just print it out yourself on your home printer. Well, if you need to have a meeting, just do a Zoom or Teams meeting.”
But then things start going wrong anyway, and people are frustrated and often can’t quite put their finger on why, or which factors are causing the problems because their useful function is no longer being performed by anything.
Some people seem to have a good instinct that “it’s somehow because all of the telework,” but because they cannot make the case in specific terms, their argument doesn’t go far with others who, usually, will not consider the situation in a fair and neutral manner because they have strong personal interests – originating in matters of personal convenience – that the social consensus shift to a consensus that there is absolutely nothing wrong with telework and it should be the new default.
I’ve been reflecting on these matters for the whole pandemic, and I could give lots of examples. The abstraction of an email ‘inbox’ does not perform all the functions of the physical inbox. You can make socially acceptable excuses that you ‘missed’ an email (don’t get me started on the mess that is ‘read receipts’), or that it got lost in a flood (which is plausible given that we have universally adopted the most terrible form factor for heavy flows of complex documents – the smartphone). If I put a binder on your chair or on top of your keyboard in your office, you are physically prevented from getting to your work without ‘being aware and taking possession’ in a way that can’t be denied.
So, it seems like a silly example precisely because people don’t often have conscious-level awareness of their impulsive moves in the big social game of bureaucratic accountability. But that is precisely the kind of context in which people are liable to be unaware of the “Chesterton Utility” of many of the elements of the physical infrastructure of the close-proximity workplace, which all contribute in the aggregate to a bigger fraction of the team’s Organizational Capital than people understand.
Another example which one would imagine everyone should know about from personal experience, but again, people seem to completely forget when transitioning to pan-telework world, is the ability to pick up on subtle non-verbal cues regarding whether someone is really receiving the message you are trying to convey. When you briefly explain something to someone in person, you can tell by intuition right away whether that person was distracted or daydreaming or looking at their smartphone (a terrible and widespread habit), or not really comprehending, or didn’t have enough of the context or background, or was too intimidated to ask a question or embarrassed to admit they didn’t know something they should have.
Picking up on this, you can adjust or repeat or add content or say something like, “Repeat back to me what I just said,” or “Actually, I think I messed that up and it came out confusing. Did that make sense?” This gives the person a face-saving opportunity to say no because really, it’s your ‘fault’, so you can go over it again at a more appropriate level.
The “Chesterton’s Utility” of all of those in-person interactions that people believe we can just ditch entirely goes completely out of the window with email, and while people kind of know that, they are reluctant to acknowledge it because there is no face-saving way to do so. Either you didn’t read the email (blame) or you weren’t competent enough to understand it (blame) or didn’t even understand that you didn’t understand it (blame), or you were too cowardly to ask for clarification (blame). While it’s possible there are technological innovations which could address those problems, there is no demand signal for them or ability to justify the expenditure, because again, “What, are you saying you’re too dumb to use email?”
What’s more interesting to think about is that, in my judgment, the most severe deficit of digital communication over the in-person kind is the lack of privacy and secrecy and deniability, the perceived and often real need for which simply cannot be overstated. Leadership and now many ordinary-level teleworkers currently go to a lot of sketchy efforts to evade the “paper trail” problem of legally or technically discoverable communications: texting on secure, ephemeral messaging apps via their personal smartphones because your work phone is being ‘managed’ i.e., spied on, and also via phone calls, Zoom meetings, etc.
Of course if you are using work phones and work laptops, then those too could be being recording in a clandestine manner, and it’s only a matter of time (and this future is already present reality at some places) before all the audio from all of those things is transcribed by voice-recognition algorithms and added to a metadata layer to the recording, which means the giant database is easily and cheaply searchable for anything blameworthy for the rest of time.
Again, this is a very useful thing that is lost when everybody is teleworking, but that people are very reluctant to acknowledge is important and something they need. There is no good way to answer, “What do you have to hide?” without getting dragged into the quicksand of trying to discuss the occasional need to slightly relax some social norms in a detached and analytical way without signalling that you are the kind of person who lacks absolute commitment to those norms.
So people aren’t able to articulate their needs for certain functions, and so they are unable to easily ‘cover’ to substitute for those functions when an essential part in the machine of their organizational capital is removed.
Wineguard attacks populism uncharitably and without any apparent understanding of its principles or traditions. That is fine. Even a very good book like the Roger Kimball edited Vox Populii has multiple essays that manage to jump from the Romans to the William Jennings Bryan and the USA Populist Party.
To understand conservatism relative to populism, one must look to the great thinkers of the English Civil War: John Lambert, John Lilburne, Richard Overton, Rainsborough, and others.
https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/levelers-libertarian-revolutionaries
Their principles:
1. popular sovereignty
2. extended suffrage
3. equality before the law
4. religious tolerance
5. No redistribution and common property except by private contract between willing parties.
All though a certain sect of libertarians at one time claimed these individuals and principles as their own, libertarians today reject all five in favor of technocratic authoritarianism.
Conservatives reject 5, and for them 1 is just a legal fiction.
But the philosophy of populism has been greatly enriched since then, not least perhaps by Amartya Sen. Sen of course introduced the radically populist idea that mass famine was not an acceptable price to pay for free markets, socialism, or other utopian schemes. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Amartya-Sen#ref669445
With such an understanding, perhaps USA intellectuals can move beyond straw manning.
I can imagine (small “L”) libertarians debating about items 1 and 2 (e.g., representative government vs pure democracy), but I no libertarian worthy of the name who would disagree with 3-5. Do you have examples?
Edit: “I [know] no libertarian …”
On equality before the law, libertarianism seems to have been overtaken by H.L. Mencken types who have contempt for the masses and believe wise libertarian judges and really smart technocrats should be able to rule the masses in their own interest. My go-to example here is Randy Barnett’s The Structure of Liberty in which everything will rest on the shoulders of wise judges who know best, essentially a kritarchy. The elite and the masses are in no way equal before the law in such a scheme.
In general I get the impression that libertarians are opposed to democratically adopted systems of morality, particularly if the morality is deemed religious. So, for example, Dr. Kling has expressed opposition in this blog to regulation of abortion as “coercion.” A democratic majority might favor laws against prostitution on religious grounds and this would be something that the typical libertarian reflexively opposes.
And recently I have gotten the impression that libertarians are opposed to private ordering if it conflicts with some other pressing issue of the day. So for example, in the war against local zoning authority, all too many libertarians were happy to oppress homeowners associations and coerce them into approving multi family dwellings in single family HOA developments.
Rule of law is foundational to libertarianism. No just society can have different sets of laws – one for the “elites” (or the politically-favored du jour) and one for the “masses.”
Randy Barnett is a lawyer and legal scholar so, if in fact he sees the world as a nail for his gavel to pound, it’s hardly surprising. He hardly speaks for all libertarians, though.
Libertarians disagree on abortion. I oppose it, though not on religious grounds. I just don’t believe that anyone should have the right to decide which human beings aren’t “persons” and therefore not worthy of basic human rights. This type of thinking worked badly in cases such as slavery and the Holocaust.
More generally, libertarians respect emergent order and would not (or, in my opinion, should not) discard adopted systems of morality – and certainly not by top-down fiat. We’ve seen the damage done by, for example, the sexual revolution. Progressives are horrified by many of the results (see the #MeToo movement, for example) and are trying to cobble together laws and edicts to restore some of what was lost. Typically, though, their top-down solutions don’t work nearly as well as did the socially-enforced traditions that they destroyed.
With respect to zoning, libertarians point to Houston as their model. Yet the city does have housing developments with HOA rules. There’s no issue with contractual agreements. If I bought a house in the Happy Dale subdivision and agreed to its rules, then I shouldn’t be outraged when the development takes me to court because I insisted on painting my house neon green and covering it with millions of flashing LEDs. Nor do should I feel oppressed because my subdivision requires that I not drive through it at 100mph with my stereo set on stun.
What libertarians do object to, however, is people demanding the right to control what you do with property located outside any areas that have contractual restrictions.
I certainly can respect that. Especially on rule of law.
“No just society can have different sets of laws – one for the “elites” (or the politically-favored du jour) and one for the “masses.””
Social Justice progressivism says otherwise, that, on the contrary, no just society can have the same laws for everyone, if the outcomes don’t come out right. I can’t emphasize enough how opposite and fundamentally irreconcilable these conceptions are, how there is thus no possibility of stable compromise or settlement, and how that stark difference is at the root of a lot of our troubles.
A common way to express the distinction between traditional conservatism (right) and social justice progressivism (left) is to ask for the proper ranking of priority between ‘process’ and ‘outcomes’ in terms of the very definition of – or way to assess whether something is – just or fair.
Someone on the right will typically say, “If the rules are fair and the process is fair, then the outcomes are fair.”
Someone of the left will say, “On the contrary, if the outcomes are unequal then they are unfair, thus someone causally upstream unfairly caused it. The apparent fairness of the rules and process is an illusion and a fraud and a misleading smokescreen merely covering up some intolerable unfairness, which should either be removed at the source, or remedied by whatever intervention is required in terms of adequately compensating the victims of that unfairness, or putting a thumb on the scale to level the distribution of outcomes themselves.”
It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine which of these perspectives is more compatible with the concept of “the rule of law.”
If libertarians want to get rid of zoning laws, they need to ensure public safety and effective public schooling, even if there are underclass people in the neighborhood/school zone. If they can’t, they shouldn’t expect people to give up their zoning.
You can rail all you want about school choice or whatever, but the bottom line is that is that in the current situation which libertarians have failed to change the fact that who lives near you has a dramatic effect on your live and huge externalities, so people are going to defend their interests.
And besides, its not like my burbclave has the right to manage its own affairs. There is an army of government agents and laws ready to mess with my affairs, so I’ve got to get involved in government too.
Many, I believe, there are
Who live a life of virtuous decency,
Men who can hear the Decalogue and feel
No self-reproach; who of the moral law
Established in the land where they abide
Are strict observers; and not negligent,
Meanwhile, in any tenderness of heart
Or act of love to those with whom they dwell,
Their kindred, and the children of their blood.
Praise be to such, and to their slumbers peace!
—But of the poor man ask, the abject poor,
Go and demand of him, if there be here
In this cold abstinence from evil deeds,
And these inevitable charities,
Wherewith to satisfy the human soul?
– Wordsworth
I would say that I am sympathetic to the libertarian position on most issues. By that I simply mean that voluntary, win-win transactions between consenting adults ought to be allowed in almost all contexts.
However, there exist certain contexts in which I am conflicted. For example, let us take Vancouver real estate. Suppose that the libertarian position were that any property owner in Vancouver could sell their property to the highest bidder anywhere on the planet. So someone in Singapore purchases said property. The libertarian in me says this is a good thing. A win-win transaction. But then another part of me says what if a local 20 year old, born and raised in Vancouver, slowly gets priced out of the real estate market in his home city. Such that he either has to rent longer, get a considerable higher income to afford higher housing prices or he leaves his home city.
Is this a good thing?
In the long run a non issue?
Should the people of Vancouver be allowed to get together and vote in laws that would ban such voluntary transactions between a citizen of Vancouver and a citizen of Singapore? Or increase the cost of said transaction to give the locals an advantage?
I admit I am conflicted.
Let me give you “Handle’s Test”.
If what you are reading feels like a vague feelgood sermon making unobjectionable calls for moral renewal, at the end of which some “waiting for the other shoe to drop” reflex was unsatisfied with the absence of the conclusion: “And let us say, Amen,” then it is not actually worth anything as serious political commentary.
If I were scoring the FIT game, I would give a point to “political sermon heckling”, which we need a lot more of. That is, being willing to say “Boo!” when everyone else is saying “Amen” and then explaining why. I confess I am biased about this because I find myself doing this kind of thing a lot of the time. I actually like real sermons and say amen, but fake political sermons annoy me, and the constant stream of ones like this is starting to get on my nerves.
In the last five years or so, I’ve definitely read a number with three digits of nearly identical and bland articles about “conservative principles” that are flexible enough to accommodate anything.
The fundamental intellectual problem at an almost philosophical level is that these vague principles are “incomplete” in analogy to mathematical logic, that is, they cannot be used in the manner of axioms to derive ‘correct’ answers to positions on any particular policy or even to be anything more than indifferent between opposing possibilities – let alone adjudicate between them – without being supplemented by a minimal number of empirical ‘anchors’ or additional ‘tethers’ to claims about human nature and reality, and as an incomplete set, cannot actually serve as a useful political ideology. That progressivism has these tethers – regardless of how unreal and dangerous they are – is what enables those principles to serve as a magisterium for derivation of ‘correct’ positions which is one of its fundamental strengths. Is it ‘conservative’ according to Winegard-conservatism or Levin-conservatism to have strictly regulated borders, or open borders? Somewhere in between, but if so, where, and why there?
To put it metaphorically, imagine you try to build a tall tower, but it turns out the property claims over where to secure the guy-wires are just too hard to settle, so you say, “Hey guys, these arguments are too heated, so how about let’s just not do the whole guy-wires things, ok?” Well, ok, but your tower will just bend whichever way the wind blows, or worse.
There’s a reason why cutting guy-wires is a big-bang-for-your-buck form of vandalism, just like a strategic cut of a cable with a single, relatively tiny device is enough to make a whole suspension bridge collapse into its bay. What progressivism has done to every other ideological movement it to force them to cut their key guy-wires, and that is why none of them is standing tall.
Avoiding typical sources of contention and focusing on describing your common ground on top of which to build your Big Tent in an effort to maintain coalition harmony and try to prevent your fissiparous alliance from flying apart as if you were a marriage counselor avoiding hot button issues and raw nerves, is find unless it means you still can’t describe the tent that will be built on that common ground.
The devil is in the details, and trying to evade hard controversies at the level of those details causes these writers to play Tribe’s “Levels of Generality” game but then to secretly embed their own ideological positions and preferences as if they can be derived by this illusion of ‘common ground’. This is an unfortunately under-recognized and under-criticized but still consistent theme in, for example, the work of Cass Sunstein.
Consider: Winegard starts, “The conservative movement is in crisis.” Meanwhile, over at Cato Unbound, Kavin Vallier begins, “Classical liberalism, the political movement to which I belong, is in decline.” Cowen puts the same idea as euphemistically and diplomatically as possible, “Having tracked the libertarian “movement” for much of my life, I believe it is now pretty much hollowed out, at least in terms of flow.” The same could be said for the state of the family or religion or originalism or federalism. Let’s face it: the same could be said for the state of everything that’s not high-status woke progressivism.
Let me use a metaphor. About 150 years ago the ship rat got loose in New Zealand. To call it merely an ‘invasive species’ or ‘threatening pest’ doesn’t quite get at the scale of the problem, which is that they have typical rodent fecundity and that they can and do eat *everything*, and those species have not evolved any natural defenses and thus stand no chance of establishing an adaptive equilibrium before being wiped out. They eat the lizards and fish and bugs, they eat the birds, and they eat their eggs. They eat the plants too: the seeds, the roots, everything.
Now, imagine those poor endangered species, “The Kiwi movement is in crisis.” – “We classical worms are in decline” – “I believe the skinks are hollowed out in terms of flow.” You want to say, “Guys! Wake up! It’s the *rats*!”
I don’t think libertarians reject (4) outright. For example, tradition and custom, along with intuition (5), are how we discern “natural rights”. How would natural rights be “self-evident” if not through our intuitions, informed by tradition and custom? For example, don’t natural property rights derive mainly from tradition and custom regarding how historical use and occupation of property evolves into a property right?
Libertarians use reason (3) to derive a *coherent* set of first principles that weave together tradition and custom (4) and intuition (5). They see a set of natural rights that emerge from intuition shaped by tradition and custom. Then, they use that coherent set of first principles to reject aspects of tradition, custom, and intuition that don’t fit, i.e., that are inconsistent with the other tradition, customs, and intuitions that gave rise to the first principles. So, the libertarians differ from conservatives (and many progressives for that matter) mainly in that libertarians are more likely to reject logical incoherence and inconsistency.
I also take issue with the notion that libertarians “gravitate towards utopianism”, at least not utopianism that combines “with ideologies that promote concentrated political power”. The extreme flavors of libertarianism that reject (1) and (2) seem to flirt with anarchy, the opposite of concentrated political power.
All True Libertarians “use reason (3) to derive a *coherent* set of first principles that weave together tradition and custom (4) and intuition (5)”. No True Libertarian would “gravitate toward utopianism”.
I suggest that Arnold reread the first paragraph of Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit”
One of my movie influences from High School was Patton, with GC Scott’s rendition of Patton’s speech. Including:
“America loves a winner, and will not tolerate a loser.”
You have to be willing to fight in order to win.
All of Winegard’s semi-conservative panties in a bunch complaining about how “conservative” Trump is, or isn’t; it’s mostly beside the point. The soul of the Republican Party is not conservative principles, it’s Love of the America they remember growing up in.
The vast majority of Rep voters supported Trump in his FIGHT. And they were, and still are, tired of losing. Losing their comfy Boomer led middle class “normal” America, the Shining City on the Hill – not perfect, but the best in the world – the heart’s desire of so many who want to “be free”. Losing decisions in courts to change laws and norms, like Roe on abortion, and for gay marriage (most of the fight was a proxy by anti-abortionists who also opposed gay marriage as “equal” to normal marriage that usually produces children). Losing the media “framing” wars. Losing American culture – being falsely labeled as homophobic, racist, white nationalists; now “domestic terrorists”.
Some 2/3 of Americans didn’t graduate from college, thus are not “elite”. Most of the college grads are Democrats. The non-college “normals” will be getting more upset and more anti-elite until the median wage goes up faster that the top 10% (90 percentile) or top 1%. It was doing so under Trump (elites hate that).
Trump policies remain popular, even if his “style” is disliked by most elites, as well as many normals who yet support his policies.
America First.
Stop illegal immigration.
Drill, Baby, Drill (Palin had the right idea and the best phrase) – low cost gas.
Tax cuts for workers.
Bring our boys home, end the “endless wars”.
Bring manufacturing back to America, less outsourcing.
China is a big and increasingly threatening rival – confront her, confront Xi, the commie President-dictator who enslaves millions of Chinese citizens.
Free Trade – or at least less unbalanced managed trade of US trade deficits.
No CRT training paid for by gov’t – it’s racist anti-white indoctrination.
Notice how most Trump critics mostly refuse to name his actual policies that they say are wrong; except Covid. Where most experts are “wrong”, and there is as yet no consensus on what should have been done, when. Nor even how well masks work, or don’t.
“Timeless truths” are good for ideology. The Republicans, like the Dems, are a political party, with the goal of winning elections. Policies, and promises, win the elections more than principles.
Most American historians agree that Mayor Daly of Chicago stole the election from Nixon (R) to allow Kennedy (D) to win. I’d bet that 5 – 10 years after Trump dies, historians trying to gain trust by being meticulous and careful will conclude that there probably was so much fraud in 2020 that Trump should have won.
It’s a fact that Biden is President.
It’s disputed that he won a fair and fraud-free election.
How should a “true conservative”, or even “Libertarian”, act if they believe the election was stolen?
Maybe look at the decentralized web? https://docs.ipfs.io/
(not sure I like InterPlanetary File System as a name, but IPFS is OK).
Thank you for as good example as one would get from the real world about what Bo Winegard is talking about.
>—“How should a “true conservative”, or even “Libertarian”, act if they believe the election was stolen?”
Glad you asked Tom.
They should recheck the evidence from the 60 plus court cases where that was thoroughly litigated and reconsider Arnold Kling’s description of this election fraud myth as “a cancerous lie.” Then they should reestablish contact with reality.