The Conservative-Libertarian Debate: An Historical View

Part I

Following up on my recent post, “The Conservative Dilemma: Turf Wars, Fusionism or Alliance?” I re-read Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate (George Carey, ed.), published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 1984. Although as I said in the previous post, few rank-and-file conservatives really care much about Neo-Con/Paleo-Con conflicts or conservative/libertarian disagreements, as Richard Weaver has famously said “ideas [do] have consequences.” The thoughts of those who have formulated these positions do filter down to the masses through the media, journals, and books.

While anti-communism and opposition to welfare-state “liberalism” had provided the glue that held conservatives and libertarians together in the 1950s, their cohesiveness had already begun to rupture when Frank Meyer published his In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo in 1962, in an attempt “to reconcile the libertarian concern for liberty with the traditionalists’ preoccupation with order and virtue” (Carey, “Introduction,” Freedom and Virtue, p. 3). The conflict in the early 1980s, as the above volume assessed the situation, was divided between traditional conservatives such as Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet and libertarians such as Murray Rothbard and Tibor Machan, with fusionists in the middle, who, like Frank Meyer, believed in a possible melding of conservatism and libertarianism into a hybrid movement.

The Libertarians

In the 1980s, libertarians could be divided into limited government libertarians who believed in the “night watchman” state, and anarcho-libertarians, like Rothbard, who were openly hostile to all forms of government. Libertarians generally trace their intellectual ancestry back to John Stuart Mill’s famous “one very simple principle” from On Liberty (1869), where he stated:

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

Both Machan and Rothbard hold that libertarianism is primarily a political doctrine (Machan, “Libertarianism: The Principle of Liberty,” Freedom and Virtue, p. 37): “a political philosophy, confined to what the use of violence should be in social life” (Rothbard, Freedom and Virtue, p. 96). Libertarians are in principle opposed to state coercion of individual behavior unless it is preventative of violence against others. This does not include any right of the state to intrude upon the commission of so-called “victimless” crimes, such as prostitution and drug abuse. Both Machan and John Hospers take a more moderate approach. For example, Machan raises the issue of moral standards and social ethics: If the libertarian is against government coercion to prevent behavior he considers to be wrong, degrading, or vicious, does that mean that he tacitly approves of such behavior? While arguing against state coercion or legal sanctions against such behavior, Machan advocates: “voluntary approaches” including “ostracism, rebuke, boycott,” as societal means of delimiting antisocial behavior (Machan, op. cit. p. 45).

Hospers’ approach is rather conciliatory towards conservatives, and one might say, open to “fusion.” He notes “numerous gray areas” in the application of what has been called the “non-aggression principle.” For example, while generally in favor of drug legalization, Hospers offers that “PCP can turn one into a madman, a danger to everyone in the vicinity” (“Differences of Theory and Strategy,” Freedom and Virtue, p. 60). One wonders what he might think of the current methamphetamine epidemic, a drug which also has the potential to turn one into a violent madman. Significantly, Hospers also raises the issue of those actions that give offense to others: “[I]s there also a right not to be offended?” he asks ((Ibid. p. 61). As political correctness has become the religion of our current establishment, there are now legal sanctions (hate crimes) against giving offense to members of designated victim groups, not to mention the careers that are ruined if even a hint of bigotry is unearthed from a person’s past.

One of the greatest weaknesses of modern libertarianism is in the area of foreign policy, where libertarian options range from defensive wars only to the anarcho-libertarian solutions of private armies or no defense at all. Hospers is critical of libertarian theories of foreign policy, arguing that “many libertarians hid their heads in the sand in matters of foreign policy” (Ibid., p. 67). For example, he criticized libertarians for conveniently underplaying the threat of communism and the Soviet Union, and for actually aiding the process of Soviet “disinformation” perpetuated in the American news media.

In the 1980s, Rothbard presented the most extreme version of libertarianism. In “Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian Manqué,” Rothbard takes the position that Meyer was basically a libertarian who was conciliatory towards conservatives due to the expediency of putting together a political movement. Rothbard observed that Meyer, like other libertarians, believed that “to be virtuous in any meaningful sense, a man’s action must be free”: “no action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen” (Ibid., pp. 92 – 93). And while individual freedom was the necessary and highest political end, it was not “the highest end of man per se” (Ibid., p. 95). Thus, Rothbard’s response to conservatives who accused him of holding individual freedom to be the highest value was that he did not (nor did Machan or Hospers): Libertarianism was a political philosophy only that held that freedom of choice was a necessary condition for a moral life and a good society, but it was not a philosophy of life or an end in itself.

Although Rothbard had an antagonistic relationship with traditional conservatives such as Russell Kirk, whose contribution to the above volume, “Libertarians: The Chirping Sectaries,” was dismissive of Rothbard’s view, in the late 1980s Rothbard reconciled with some of the younger members of the new Paleo-Conservative movement, such as Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles magazine. This occurred after Rothbard had a falling out with the more establishment (or left leaning) libertarians of the Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party. At some point in the early 1990s, he actually supported the Republican Party. Rothbard died in 1995 leaving leadership of his organization, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, to his associate, Lew Rockwell. In January 2008, Paul Kirchick of The New Republic wrote a piece, “Angry White Men,” exposing the so-called bigoted past of Ron Paul, in which a newsletter with Paul’s byline made some derogatory statements about black Americans, including Martin Luther King. As it turns out, Rockwell was reputed to have been the author of those letters, so after both he and Paul performed their necessary mea culpas to the altar of political correctness, Rockwell is reported to have abandoned Paleo-Libertarianism “the once-promising intellectual movement that stayed true to libertarian principles while opposing open borders, libertinism, egalitarianism, and political correctness” (see Arthur Pendleton, “Lew Rockwell and the Strange Death of Paleolibertarianism,” vdare.com, May 14, 2008).

Next Week: The Conservatives, and Conservative-Libertarian Fusionism

The Conservative Dilemma in America: Turf Wars, Fusionism or Alliance?

With the two major election losses of 2006 and 2008, the Republican Party has respectively lost Congress and the Presidency and now finds itself adrift and in search of a new identity. It seems at this point, with the Tea Parties and anti-ObamaCare movements, that conservative leadership is coming more from the grassroots than from the Republican Party. But while I’ve supported third parties in the past, when conservatives were in power instead of a statist left wing regime, this is not a time for such advocacy if conservatism is to survive, as the statist transformation of American society and government promoted by the Obama administration is in the process of inflicting irreparable damage on the Republic. At its inception in the 1950s, the conservative movement had a common foe in Soviet Communism abroad and Progressive statism at home. I think we live in similar times, although the threat at home is currently drowning out the threat of Islamic jihadism abroad.

In the 1960s, Frank S. Meyer, a communist before converting to libertarianism and joining the staff at William F. Buckley’s National Review, promoted the theory of “fusionism”: a political philosophy that unites elements of libertarianism and conservatism (See Wikipedia). Meyer argued his theory in his book, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (1962), although he had not yet dubbed his theory “fusionism.” It is fair to say that Meyer’s thesis was not received with undiluted acclaim as none other than Russell Kirk, one of the father’s of American Conservatism ‘retorted that “individualism” (the term then used for libertarianism) was “social atomism” and even anti-Christian. The political result of individualism, he said, was inevitably anarchy.’ Kirk also criticized Meyer’s fusionism and individualism for its rationalism, and countered that ‘Custom, tradition, and the wisdom of our ancestors . . . constituted the firm foundation upon which a society should be built.’ (Lee Edwards, “The Conservative Consensus: Frank Meyer, Barry Goldwater, and the Politics of Fusionism,” Heritage Foundation, January 22, 2007, p. 1). Meyer had previously criticized Kirk’s seminal The Conservative Mind (1953) for lacking any “clear and distinct principle,” or a comprehension of the institutions of a free society (Ibid.).

Friedrich Hayek joined in the fray with his essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (The Constitution of Liberty, 1960), where he criticized Kirk and fellow conservatives for not understanding economics, for “strident nationalism,” and for a lack of “any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments” (Edwards, p. 2). Needless to say, while fusionism wasn’t perfect, it worked well enough to help nominate Goldwater in 1964 and elect Reagan to the Presidency in 1980. I’ve written previously in “Political Definitions: Conservative, Liberal, and Libertarian” about how I think Hayek’s classical liberalism or libertarianism can be reconciled with conservatism, as Hayek was an admirer of Burke, the father of Anglo-American conservatism, and his theory of “spontaneous order” was respectful of traditions that evolved historically. George Carey has also written about the compatibility of Hayek’s “evolutionary” theory of society with traditional conservatism (“Conservatives and Libertarians View Fusionism,” Modern Age, Winter 1982, Vol. 26, No. 1, p. 12).

Reflecting upon my own political philosophy, which combines elements of conservatism and libertarianism, there is an uneasy contradiction inherent in such a point of view. For the modern libertarian, freedom or liberty is the highest virtue, including political, economic, and social liberties, whereas for the conservative, while freedom may be important, tradition has earned a higher place in his sentiments. Of course in America, where our tradition is one of classical liberalism, liberty and freedom are at the core, making it a bit easier to entertain inconsistencies. We, after all, do not have a tradition of Toryism or monarchism, as do the Europeans. But there’s definitely a difference between classical liberals, such as Edmund Burke, a Whig who was also religious, and modern Progressive Liberals, who are influenced by Marxism and other socialisms, and tend to be irreligious. But even classical liberals or libertarians are often irreligious and ready to overturn traditional cultural institutions when they obstruct economic freedom or individual liberty, and there lies the rub. It is also significant that those of us on the Right always have to consider this contradiction between freedom and tradition, some of us embracing one or the other, but many of us struggling with the contradiction, while those on the Left almost universally embrace equality as the primary political virtue. Thus, rather than a contradiction, their thought exists on a continuum of Statist egalitarianism, from Progressivism and social democracy on one end to democratic socialism and the absolutism of communism on the other end of the scale. As my readers may have observed in their own experience, for the left, the enemy is always to the right, seldom if ever on the left.

Contemporary internecine disputes are complicated by the ascendency of Neo-Conservatism in the Republican Party power structure, although with recent election defeats, the Neo-Con standard has been in some disrepute, as Bush’s foreign policy was largely designed by Neo-Con strategists. While in the course of my own conversion to conservatism in the late1980s, as an avid reader of Chronicles magazine, I have felt more affinity for the traditional conservatism espoused there by Thomas Fleming and fellow travelers such as the late Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried and Pat Buchanan, than I have with Neo-Conservatism, but I must say, I’ve never liked the term Paleo-Conservative and find the conservative infighting between the Paleos and Neos to be rather tedious. Beyond a few well-known examples, I’m often not sure, nor do I care, who is a Neo and who is a Paleo. (I confess as well to disagreeing with the Paleos about Israel, while I agree with their stance on illegal immigration, and to some degree, on economic matters. But to complicate my own political affinities further, I was also influenced by so-called Paleo-Libertarians such as Murray Rothbard and his mentor, Ludwig von Mises, Hayek as I’ve previously noted, and Ron Paul.) That aside, the average conservative American voter really doesn’t give a damn about the Neo-Paleo conflict, and such academic politico squabbling reminds me of Freud’s phrase, “the narcissism of minor differences,” which he used to describe “the phenomenon that is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other” (Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 61). This is not to say that there are no real points of contention between Neo-Cons and Paleo-Cons, but disagree or not, if they don’t unite to battle their common foe of left wing statism, the battle will be lost before it begins.

That said, what are some of the policy implications inherent in a Republican coalition that includes traditional conservatives, libertarians, and neo-conservatives? Several issues emerge. In the economic sphere, the conservative dilemma is whether to pursue a global free trade policy despite the fact that the U.S. has a huge trade deficit with China and Japan, or whether to pursue a more nationalistic economic trade policy. Paleo-Cons tend to prefer the latter course whereas Neo-Cons and Libertarians tend to prefer the former policies. Both sides do believe in free markets; the Paleos however, want reciprocal trade agreements. As I’ve said elsewhere in “Is the Republican Party Really Conservative?” Adam Smith did not promote the idea that a free market nation should tolerate huge trade deficits. But as we’ve all discovered with the recent global financial collapse, when it comes to modern global economics, nothing is simple. I recently began reading David Smick’s The World Is Curved (2008) because I wanted to understand, from an insider’s point-of-view, what happened in the economic meltdown of 2008. While I am personally in favor of some kind of return to the gold standard and have been influenced by Austrian economics (see “Inflation, the National Debt, and Monetary Reform”), Smick does make some good points: For example, without all the easy capital flows and credit, the global economic expansion of the past 25 years would not have been possible. That doesn’t change my views as to the need for monetary reform because I don’t think the bubble to bust cycle is good for the average American, but it does point to the fact that now that we have a Democratic Congress in favor of increased government regulation of the economy, redistributionism, and protectionism, there could be drastic unintended consequences following economic tinkering by clueless politicians. Smick wrote:

The problem, however, is that in a highly entrepreneurial economy, it is difficult, if not impossible, to micromanage wealth distribution without negative countereffects. To some extent, the system must tolerate a certain amount of ugly distributional “unfairness” with the greater goal of producing an explosion in wealth creation, greater job creation, and broad-scale poverty reduction. (p. 88)

Another area of dispute between Paleo-Cons, Neo-Cons, and Libertarians is in foreign policy where Neo-cons tend to prefer an internationalist/interventionist and Pro-Israeli foreign policy whereas Paleo-Cons and Libertarians prefer a more Nationalist America First policy in the case of the former and an anti-war policy in the latter case, both of which tend to be non-interventionist. These are real differences that won’t disappear in the near future. Both sides of the conservative movement do, however, believe in a strong national defense.

In summary, all of these policy differences make a right wing coalition government much more problematic than a left wing government, which is at least fairly united in the goal of increased statism and greater government control in the lives of individual Americans: On the left the question is generally how much and how fast to increase government power, not whether to be for or against globalization or illegal immigration or interventions in the Middle East. While these differences do exist on the left, particularly on the issue of globalization, they do not generally elicit the passionate infighting that is apparent on the right. Of course, we shall see, with Democratic control of Congress and the Presidency, how Obama will handle the dissatisfactions of the extreme left, and more moderate Dems on the center-left of the Party.

While I think it’s essential to have thinkers who take principled Paleo-Con, Neo-Con, and Libertarian positions, to win an election in a democratic republic like the United States involves winning over a broad coalition to your point-of-view. So while a fusion of the three positions may not be possible, after all, people with differences do not melt into a common stew, a coalition that includes Paleos, Neos, and Libertarians is possible: a coalition or alliance against a common enemy, left wing statism. As I argued in “Is the Republican Party Really Conservative?” we can agree about our values in favor of individual liberty, economic freedom, limited government, opposition to political correctness in our cultural institutions, and pro-American rather than anti-American foreign and domestic policies, despite the significant disagreements enumerated above. Without such an alliance, which as I’ve argued in “Conservative Populism,” must also include Reagan Democrats, an appeal to youth, and hold on to most of the Religious Right, America will end up being a mere shadow of its former self, a socialistic mess of a third world banana republic.

Feminists ignore “man-cession”

US commentator Christina Hoff Sommers points out that US Feminist groups have been complaining that too much stimulus spending is going on male dominated areas of employment.

Subsequently, the stimulus spending has been reviewed and 42 percent will now be re-directed towards jobs held by women.

This is despite the fact that males have incurred 80 percent of jobs losses in the recession (hence the phrase man-cession) and that males are much more numerous in the run-down transport and communication sectors, which are arguably most in need of government investment.

(Hat Tip: Glen Sacks)

Fun at the circus

As the Republican primaries move into full swing, its nice to see at least one of the more genuinely conservative candidates, Fred Thompson, starting to pick up support.

After a poor showing in Iowa, Thompson has finally started to go on the offensive and arguably came out on top in the debate in New Hampshire. A pleasing example of this was his criticism of neoconservative Rudy Giuliano for running an illegal alien "sanctuary city" as Major of New York.

I don't know much about Thompson's previous record on immigration, but he at least appears to be a man who is willing to listen to grass roots opinion and sense which way the wind is blowing. Whether Thompson can be considered a serious contender for the Presidency is debatable, he's cuts a reasonably impressive figure (he should do, he is an actor) but he lacks the political savvy of John McCain and doesn't come across as intelligent as the highly articulate Mitt Romney. Romney's only real weakness from a campaign perspective is the fact that his impressive package of good looks, curtesy, intelligence and debating skill seems a little too good to be true.

Besides Thompson, the only other other candidate who is taking a serious stance on immigration is paleo-libertarian maverick Ron Paul. Despite his poor showing in the debates, Paul's honesty and humour is at least providing some light relief from the polished cliches of more fancied contenders like Huckabee and Romney, and thanks to the wonders of satellite television he's become an unlikely hero among some kiwi libertarians (It's nice to see some political enthusiasm guys, but we don't actually get to vote in this one).

While It's unlikely Paul will ever make in into the Whitehouse, he does have the opportunity to really take the other candidates to task over US foreign policy and its connection to the country's fiscal health.

Where is an indebted America supposed to get the money to fight two ongoing wars in the Middle East, secure its southern border, and pay for pensions and Medicare? Surely something has to give?

Unfortunately though, he can't seem to resist going off on minor tangents, such as American arms sales to the Middle East, instead of asking the other candidates hard questions on spending priorities. When Paul says things like, and "in any case we haven't got the money," he seems to assume America's dire fiscal problems are already common knowledge and that most people have an intimate knowledge of the differences between Austrian and Keynesian economics.

Forget the blimps, sort out some basic bullet points that the average voter can understand and remember.

Whatever happens in the US elections, I'm hoping conservative voters don't decide to vote for one of the neoconservative candidates like Giuliano, just because he isn't a Democrat.

In politics as in sport, nothing hurts more than an own goal.