From a Handle comment on problems with contemporary libertarian thought.
A steady slouching towards progressivism. (e.g. The Niskanen Center). Of course it is hardly alone in his regard, and one may just as easily point to trends in mainstream conservatism or Christianity.
My remarks.
1. I believe that Robert Conquest’s second law says that any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
2. I think that progressives are more prone to using the threat of scorn or excommunication, and it is hard not to respond to that. As a thought experiment, I believe that if I were to say, “I think gay marriage is ok” in a room full of conservatives, they would not hold that against me. However, if I you were to say, “I think gay marriage is wrong” in a roomful of progressives, they would give me what-for and never let me forget it.
3. Handle also says that liberatiranism tends toward
An overoptimistic – to put it charitably – account of human nature, psychology, and the decision-making capacity of most adult human beings. Specifically, there are hard questions about the nature of utility or happiness and the origin of our wants that are often overlooked.
More specifically, I think that whether libertarians break left or right depends on their outlook on human nature. The libertarians I know who break right all seem to share with conservatives a concern with the more competitive and violent propensities in human nature. The libertarians I know who break left tend to see such tendencies only in politicians.
Good summary.
Part of progressives intolerance comes from the fact that they are in power, and they know it. The mythology of oppressor/oppressed requires them to phrase is differently, but deep down they know how any power struggle will turn out. It’s not so much that they would “give you what for”, but depending on the situation your job could be in danger, while theirs isn’t, and they know it.
When leftists stage a protest, they know they aren’t really protesting, they are a sort of sanctioned arm of the establishment. Who needs jackboots officially sanctioned by the government when you can have people do the work of jackboots spontaneously, then just get out of the way and disavow while still achieving your objective. Hence people like Baltimore’s mayor on the riots saying that the police gave them “room to destroy”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_5KQC7k8Lc
It’s like how in the new Star Wars the rebels already won and overthrew the empire, and yet somehow twenty years later through modes unknown they are still “the resistance.” Aren’t they just “the government” at that point.
Demographics, both within the age subsections of Core America and from foreign aliens, will only increase progressivisms power for the next few decades. There may well come a crack up down the line due to a number of factors, but on a longer timeline then most consider.
In regards to your example about conservative and gay marriage, I think that depends on who the conservatives are and the time period in which you said it. For example, in the 1960s, a southern conservatives response to integration and interracial marriage would be quite different than a southern conservative in 2016. Among those differences, would be the fact that you would not have a legitimate risk of being murdered or beaten up.
You’re assuming that all “southern conservatives” in the 1960s were Klansmen.
Society needs continuity and preservation but also adaptation and change. Not everything is worthy of preservation just as not all change is for the good. This is why conservative and liberal are personality traits as well as political leanings. The one can’t do without the other. Libertarianism doesn’t rise to this level. What may be tolerated by conservatives under individual views is much less tolerated as a political position.
As a thought experiment, I believe that if I were to say, “I think gay marriage is ok” in a room full of conservatives
That would have not been true 10 – 15 years ago. In 2004 it was the progressives that were wishy washy on gay marriage and not the conservatives.
Thought experiment, get a room full of conservatives and state that the Iran nuclear deal is working to limit Iranian nuclear bomb capabilities and you get blasted out of the room. Or state the nuclear deal is limiting Saudia Arabia control of oil prices so it is hurting the private funding of terrorism. (Hard to prove but appears to be happening as oil has stayed low.) Or Obama’s ISIS is slowly strangling ISIS territory and Iraq army is slowly winning. (So they are using the Grant Civil War strategy.)
Conservatives have to work and get along with people who repeat that kind of horseshit all the time. We learn to let it pass.
BTW, oil prices are down, but terrorism is doing fine, in case it escaped your notice.
Then hasn’t Obama kept the USA safe from a foreign terrorist attack as long as Bush kept us safe after 9/11?
You’re changing the subject, as progressives tend to do. You said lower oil prices mean less money for terrorism, I pointed out terrorism is doing fine, as recent events in Europe show. We’ve actually had some terrorism in the US under Obama, as you might have noticed, although on a smaller scale.
Any bright ideas on how bestowing $100 billion on Iran will affect the terror problem?
“Any bright ideas on how bestowing $100 billion on Iran will affect the terror problem?”
Is that what happened?
You have to have leverage in negotiations. Once you have zero relations, you have lost most of your leverage. Can it turn out badly? Sure. So can all the other options.
Could you explain how giving $100 billion, without strings attached, to a bunch of ax-murderers gives us “leverage” over them? Do you think we’re retaining any credible threat to take anything away from them if they continue to support terrorism, as they have done since they’ve been in power?
What we’ve done is give up leverage, not create it. I suppose that’s a good thing if you think we and our allies deserve to be murdered by these thugs, which seems to be reigning theory in the Obama administration and among their pathetic isolationist-libertarian mini-me’s.
We just gave them the money a few weeks ago. Maybe you’d like to give it some time before declaring victory?
Also, handing them the money first removed your leverage.
I hope the deal works, but let’s take off the rose-tinted glasses.
“As a thought experiment, I believe that if I were to say, “I think gay marriage is ok” in a room full of conservatives”
Nope. Maybe with the well educated, fairly well off people with whom you likely associate. Get outside of the major urban areas and this is definitely wrong. When you work at a facility that is heavily conservative you learn to keep your mouth shut about challenging anything they believe, or risk not working there anymore. Heck, granted this is a few years back, but I had a surgeon (and his friends) try to get me kicked off the staff at one hospital simply because during the Iraq War I challenged his assertions about why anyone could be opposed to that war. Or the time i was asked to not send staff back to a facility because they laughed at someone who was a Young Earther. Or, etc.
In short, I think people who say this kind of stuff just have not experienced much of the world. That said, I think maybe people on the left are more likely to challenge you on social issue claims, and people on the right over economic or national defense claims, but I confess that I have no hard data to back that tup, just experience.
#2. I’ve done basically this, and you are correct.
Hmmm. I’m not seeing how the ‘liberaltarain’ positions taken by the Niskanen Center derive from a more optimistic view of human nature — somebody want to take a whack at explaining why a sunny view of human nature might have lead them to support a carbon-tax or think president Bernie might not be such a bad thing?
My own opposition to a carbon tax and global tariff regime is mainly that the official IPCC’s climate models are grossly estimating actual temperature increases and that the connection between warming and severe weather has proved to be BS — I’m prepared to change my mind if the data changes, but the more data we get, the less likely that’s looking. In any case, that seems to have little to do with a view of human nature. Similarly, the problem with ‘libertarians for Bernie’ is not that Denmark and New Zealand are hell-holes, but that I don’t believe that Sanders is at all interested in lightly regulated free markets + safety net. Instead, as far as I can tell, he’s been reflexively anti-market his entire adult life. But again, that disagreement has nothing that I can see with an overall assessment of human nature.
Yeah, why do people assume that we can throw the bowl of spaghetti of socialism at the wall and what will stick, despite evidence to the contrary (we HAVE socialized medicine already!) Is the one least bad example os socialism you can find by ignoring all the others?
Yeah, I had the same thought. I just looked at the Niskanen Center’s website, though, and it appears that every third bit of hypertext they’ve published there is about Syrian refugee resettlement. I suppose you could consider that an optimistic view of human nature: you can resettle large numbers of Syrian refugees and it’s all win-win for everybody, no costs, no downsides, no security risks, etc. Or it’s ideology-induced stupidity. Only one way to find out, I suppose.
Conquest’s law holds here, and for reasons of personality.
Progressives are group-oriented. They value group results. They want to “change the world” more than they want to change themselves. As a matter of fact, they go into jobs and groups that have a negative impact on their personal situation (often financial) because they believe it has a positive impact on the group.
Result: the more progressive members of a group are more likely to stay in the group, making their voices over represented.
Libertarians (and conservatives to the extent that they intersect) are individually-oriented. They join groups to benefit themselves, to the extent that they believe such benefit is derived honorably.
Result: the more libertarian / individualistic members of the group are less likely to stay in the group if other things (schedule, time, money) conflict with it.
TL;DR: Groups end up being dominated by group-oriented people.
No, that’s not it. Conservatives are plenty group-oriented. But they don’t have the same common source of ideological coordination as the left does or which the libertarians do.
Secular modernist small-government conservatives are always trying to get along with traditionalist and religious social conservatives who are barely talking to free market and tax-cuts (WSJ) conservatives who really have their doubts about the foreign policy of the neoconservatives who don’t trust the reform conservatives.
Trying to keep all these people in the same big tent and make them imagine they have some common interest and worldview instead of just forming some fissiparous alliance of necessity against the left is a really, really hard problem. I think too hard, these days.
That’s different from the way groups on the left fight each other. The right has distinct factions who aren’t just arguing about the size of their slice of the pie, but which have incompatible conceptions of fundamental preferences and political purposes. Fights on the left are more often about how far to push some ideological principle in practice.
Conquest’s First Law is that people are conservative about what they know best. Gell-Mann amnesia is when people see the press cover their field of expertise is a horribly inaccurate manner out of ideological ulterior motives, and then flip the page to some story out of their field, forget to apply the lesson they just learned generally, and take the reporting at face value.
What that means is that there are plenty of people with anti-progressive thoughts on small set of things they know or really care about, but who don’t see the big picture and go along with respectable elite (i.e. progressive) opinion on everything else. They don’t perceive of themselves on the right and won’t coordinate with anyone on the right. All they know is that some proposed radical and ideologically motivated change affecting their specialty is based on bad thinking and will have very bad consequences.
Indeed, most high status experts who publicly go against progressive orthodoxy on some matter and thus receive some favorable attention from the right find it necessary on those occasions to go to desperate lengths to disaffiliate and prove their liberal bona-fides so they don’t become pariahs. But if you put them all together you end up with a very robust counter to the leftist narrative. The problem is, all the individual pieces to the puzzle are like toy magnets that resist each other.
So, even if you go to extreme lengths to try and collect the cases of all these high-status one-issue heretics together, you can’t get them to agree on the same alternative fundamental vision to progressive ideology.
In fact, conservatives and libertarians are often heard remarking that the libertarians punch way above their weight in terms of influence, coordination, and so forth, and the phenomenon described above is part of why that it.
Basically, you have people who identify with the core of a society versus people who identify with the fringes. To hold together the Coalition of the Fringes, you need to demonize the core. In particular, you stigmatize negative reactions to defamatory language as justifying the defamation.