Which side are you on boys?
by digby
Elias Isquith at Salon interviewed the Cato Institute’s David Boaz about libertarianism and it’s quite interesting. He tries to convince both liberals and conservatives that they are really libertarians. And, of course, they are in some ways. Libertarianism contains elements of both ideologies. But he makes a clever dodge in this exchange that gives the game away:
If you had to pick one thing about libertarianism that liberals misunderstand the most, what would it be?
I think there is first a misunderstanding that libertarians are conservatives — and I think that’s wrong. Libertarians are classical liberals. We trace our heritage back to, not the aristocracy or established church, but to the liberal thinkers and activists who challenged those institutions.
Secondarily, I think liberals overlook how many issues libertarians and liberals share even today: religious freedom, freedom of speech, First Amendment issues, concerns about surveillance, opposition to endless war, marriage equality, opposition to the drug war, etc. There are a whole lot of such issues and my sense is that a lot of American liberals don’t see those very specific connections between libertarian and liberal interests.
Well, I can tell you, as a lefty, that the counter to that claim you often hear is that libertarians don’t pay many of those issues more than lip service, and that when push comes to shove, it’s economic policy that they really care about. What do you say in response to that charge?
Well, there’s a lot of different libertarians. We’re not a democratic-centralist organization, so we’re allowed to have our own opinions.
Certainly, there are some libertarians who prioritize economic issues, but there are libertarians who have devoted their lives to fighting the drug war; there are libertarians who are very actively against crony capitalism these days. I think libertarians have been the most forthright opponents of war in Washington for a generation at least; I remember being fairly lonely when the Cato Institute opposed the first Gulf War. So it may be a fair criticism of some libertarians, but I don’t think it’s fair criticism of the libertarian movement overall.
I would add that libertarians do believe that you can’t have peace and civil liberties and freedom in a society that isn’t fundamentally based on private property and market exchange. Obviously, that leaves room for a range of economic arrangements, from true laissez-faire capitalism to Sweden; but we do understand that when government is too dominant, when private property and markets are intruded upon too much, then you will lose personal and political freedom.
And how about if we took the same question but applied it to conservatives?
From conservatives, I think there’s a misconception that libertarians don’t care about morality. Plenty of libertarians care about morality. But as individuals, they tend not to want the government to enforce anybody’s personal morality beyond the basic [things] that are necessary for us to live together in society — rules like don’t hit other people and don’t take their stuff.
When you talk about whether individuals should use alcohol or marijuana or whether individuals should be heterosexual or homosexual or how individuals should worship God, libertarians say those things should be left in the realm of civil society and persuasion. And obviously conservatives disagree. They think the government should be involved in those kinds of questions.
(As to the question of whether women own their own bodies well, to paraphrase James Baker III, “fuck the women, they don’t vote for us anyway.” )
So let’s see. Liberals should support libertarians (like Rand Paul, for instance) because he believes as they do in civil liberties and individual rights and are against the modern aristocracy, the military industrial complex and enforced morality by the church. In fact, it would appear that the only thing that libertarians have in common with conservatives is their belief in “free markets” and the sanctity of private property.
I think that’s quite true. The obvious question, however, is if they are anti-corruption and against aristocratic rule, if they care about civil liberties, the drug war and military adventurism, why do the vast majority of self-described libertarians vote Republican? Democrats are not perfect on those issues by any means but there is a large and influential faction within the party that prioritises them while there are maybe three members of the GOP congressional caucus who would even put any of those issues on their list of concerns. It’s quite clear that they are simply not as important to libertarians as low taxes, low regulations and gun rights or some of them would support Democrats.
Any alleged crusader for individual liberty who is more comfortable getting in bed with right wing theocrats and war mongers than left wing believers in social justice and redistributive tax policy has made himself quite clear about what freedom really means to him.
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