The passivity of this cohort when faced with a hard core challenge by those intent on replacing liberal education with illiberal social control is, in that sense, a troubling mystery. One way to resolve it is to conclude that the “libertarian moment” in higher education is mostly an illusion. Is it possible that the small “l” libertarians are themselves not really libertarian at all? Could they be simply the crowd that follows where the progressives lead?
Read the whole essay to get the context.
One of my still-gestating essays concerns what I call FOOL, the Fear of Others’ Liberty. My theory is that the desire for government, or more generally for “illiberal social control,” comes from the tendency of people to fear what others will do with their liberty. You are willing to see liberty stifled, especially when you think it will be others’ liberty that will be stifled much more than your own. I am inclined to think that FOOL explains a lot.
I would say liberty exists on a spectrum with neither anarchy nor totalitarianism providing it so the question is how to maximize it, or, if you have any reason to fear government, you should have even more fear of others libertinism, so FOOL is entirely justified.
It may be useful to widen the perspective so as to perceive a symmetry.
Libertarians try to cut out from their view of “the good society” politics as much as possible, and action by the ultimate enforcer of politics, the government, because they instinctively fear what will happen in an open political order: people with diverging views will attain impact. They tend to stay away from politics and so their opponents take the political initiative.
Maybe your FOOL theory does explain a lot, but I don’t think it really does here. I think the seeming paradox the author sees here is just a result of two things:
1. A lot of the “blue jay libertarians” he describes have swallowed the social justice Kool Aid campus progressives have been serving these many decades. In other words, they find themselves at odds with the reigning campus orthodoxy far less often than the author seems to think.
2. A lot of others don’t drink said Kool Aid, but since the illiberality of modern progressivism doesn’t impact them much personally, they don’t see much need to argue about it. E.G., they don’t oppose gay marriage, so they do a lousy job of sticking up for people who do.
I think commenter Semper Why on the linked essay nailed it: the “blue jay libertarians” aren’t libertarians so much as libertines.
I’ll bite.
I fear some other people’s liberty, but not all other people’s. I don’t really want social control of everyone in the society, but I want social control of people who are likely to create huge hazards to themselves and other people. Like, say, if we issued driver’s licenses at age 12.
The problem is really equal protection. So long as I have to decide between a liberty being available for everyone, or no one, then I’m torn by a very complicated analysis problem, or have to pick some arbitrary bright line that is a really poor proxy for what I’m really worried about (like driver’s licenses at age 16 or 18).
Obviously, sometimes it’s too hard to tell who is properly in the class who should have a privilege of liberty, and who is not. And there is all kinds of room for mischief when the government gets to decide who is and who is not free. But sometimes it is pretty clear, and the government could do an ok job (like they do with some licenses).
Also, it’s not too hard to have a system of presumptive liberty license, but one that would be revokable temporarily upon evidence of certain risk factors.
The military does this with servicemembers all the time. Obviously not I am not saying greater society should be regimented, but just to give an illustrative example of how a similar system to what I’m proposing can and does work.
But all this is off the table in the current dominant axis of political debate. Framing every questions as all-or-nothing and one-size-fits-all is 90% of what neuters any movement in the libertarian direction.
There’s a kind of “inversion” of FOOL which I call Compelment.
The theory is basically that selection forces (including natural selection) select for groups that find ways to make as many entities as possible join them, and pursue their ends.
And so for example, nation-states that could not employ conscription in dire circumstances disappear in the face of those that can.
This leads me to expect that most any group (including the people on a college campus) will have strong motivations to recruit, or conscript, others to its views, to its side in the competitions of life.
So, not so much about fear of what others may do, as about a desire to compel others to join one’s side (one way or another.)
The state of modern politics reminds me of what Thomas Jefferson once wrote about slavery. “It is like a holding a wolf by the ears; you don’t like it, but you don’t dare let it go.”
If the wolf is liberty, both political parties consummately agree with the means and consequences of dealing with the wolf. I believe a true libertarian would let the wolf go. But this idea is untenable, even to some libertarians. The analogy to slavery is extreme, but apropos. Servitude makes liberty desirable. Let the wolf go, and liberty, for many, becomes terror.
How well do the various hypotheses regarding the incidence of libertarian feeling in the population explain restrictions on tobacco use?
The idea that secondhand smoke represents a threat to health could explain some of it, notably restrictions on indoor use. However, campus-wide bans seem to be the norm. This suggests either a grossly exaggerated notion of the threat represented by sidestream smoke—that someone puffing away at the far end of the mall is launching deadly nicotine molecules toward my tender pink lungs—or some other reason for wanting to restrict tobacco use. The latter hypothesis seems to be supported by the fact that campus prohibitions generally include smokeless tobacco as well.
The FOOL theory might work in this case, but only via some mechanism such as: your tobacco use adversely affects your health, and I as a taxpayer will get stuck with your health-care bill. That seems fairly weak, since the people who support stiff tobacco restrictions would probably oppose similarly stiff restrictions on risky behaviors in which they themselves engage, e.g. heavy fines for small-magnitude violations of speed limits. Moreover, it’s been pointed out that by shortening the smoker’s life, smoking may save the taxpayer a bundle: most of us eventually wind up running up an enormous bill for end-of-life care, but smokers spend less time absorbing taxpayer money via Social Security and Medicare.
I’m left with the hypothesis that people just enjoy telling other people how to live their lives, especially when the other people choose to live in non-standard ways. This seems to comport with the enthusiasm of the electorate for it’s-for-their-own-good laws: gambling bans, motorcycle-helmet requirements, and restrictions on tobacco use.
I’m afraid that a climate of increased tolerance for homosexuality and for marijuana use doesn’t indicate an increasing libertarian attitude—”I’m really creeped out by what you do, but it’s not my place to tell you how to lead your life”—but a belief that gays and pot-smokers aren’t so icky and abnormal after all, and shouldn’t be subjected to the sanctions that we enthusiastically impose on icky and abnormal people.