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

Thoughts on Liberty: The Rule of Law, Individual Responsibility, and the State

In a previous post about the Republican Party in America, I stated that “If the Republican Party is to represent true conservatism, then it must return to its core principles . . . . of liberty and freedom, including economic freedom, and [it] must be in favor of limited government and oppose statism in all its forms

I think that that is primarily true, and that when the left speaks of liberation, they generally mean liberation from the inequalities of capitalism. How do we do away with economic inequality? By doing away with economic freedom; by having an all-powerful state redistribute wealth so that all are equal, except the redistributors themselves. (As in Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) Of course, this kills the goose that lays the golden egg, because the leftist assumes that the economic pie is finite and stagnant, and all we have to do is divide it up more equally. But in fact, a capitalist economy is almost (I know, we’re in a recession) always growing, so that the poor in America are generally better off than the average citizen in a communist state. The proof: The communists had to build a wall in Berlin to keep people in; we might have to build a wall to keep people out.

But our prosperity and opportunity is generally not enough for the leftist. What the leftist wants is freedom from the vicissitudes of life. As Mike Adams wrote, Franklin Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing a right to a job, to a decent living, to a home, to adequate medical care, to a good education, and so on. Adams concluded:

These are, of course, not rights in any sense of the word. This is a promise of Utopia from a Statist president seeking to justify unlimited intrusion upon the right to own property. It is a false promise from a president who fails to understand what separates man from the lower animals.” ("Liberty and Tyranny," Townhall.com 5/06/09)

But the American left also views freedom in another way that is essentially Romantic in its origins. In this rather anarchistic view, freedom is freedom from all restraint, from all laws, authority, and social institutions. The Constitution of the United States, by way of contrast, was conceived of not as a document to restrain individuals – state and local judiciaries could adequately handle such cases – but rather to restrain any excesses and abuses of power by the federal government. It was designed to limit the power of the state. So Constitutional Law in America is not so much a restraint upon individual freedom as it is protective and constitutive of our freedom. I was an undergraduate in the mid-eighties (a slow learner no doubt) when I first realized that law, in a Constitutional Republic like the United States, was actually constitutive of liberty, and not the enemy of freedom. Hayek quotes John Locke on the role of the law in the preservation of freedom:

The end of the law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others. . . . (Constitution of Liberty, p. 162)

Hayek argued that it is the law that makes us free, but this is true only of the law of abstract general rules, which can be applied equally to all citizens. This is what is known as “the Rule of Law,” which differs from laws as specific commands, emanating from a legislative authority (Constitution of Liberty, pp. 155 – 6). When Obama states that he wants Supreme Court Judges who specifically have “empathy” for minorities, he is arguing for applying the law unequally, and privileging certain members of society to the detriment of others. As Hayek wrote: “The true contrast to a reign of status is the reign of general and equal laws, of the rules which are the same for all, or, we might say, of the rule of leges in the original meaning of the Latin word for laws – leges that is, as opposed to the privi-leges” (Ibid., p. 154). Both Affirmative Action and Hate Crimes are contrary to the rule of law and equality before the law, because they privilege certain favored (victim) groups. One might ask, why should it be anymore heinous to brutally murder a gay or lesbian or a member of some other privileged minority than anyone else?

There is also another sense in which the Romantic leftist view of freedom as “freedom from all restraint” proves to be inadequate. In the Burkean sense, it confuses liberty with license, which is freedom without responsibility. Again, if we turn to Hayek, he states, “Liberty and responsibility are inseparable” (p. 71). If we are free to act as we please then we must also be responsible for our actions. Hayek justifies “assigning responsibility” because it also benefits us by teaching us what we “ought to consider in comparable future situations” (p. 76). Taking responsibility for our actions is how we learn from our experiences; otherwise, we’re condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

In the modern “therapeutic state” (see Philip Rieff’s critique of the same in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 1966), which subscribes to the Romantic view of human nature, individual responsibility is discounted in favor of social responsibility. With origins in Rousseau’s thought, the belief is that we are born good and that it is society that corrupts us. A personal standard of behavior, or what we might call morality, ceases to matter; what counts in the new morality are what politically correct causes one espouses. What I call “bumper sticker morality” is proudly displayed on the rear automobile bumper of most card carrying leftists. When one deviates from the new morality, it is usually pathologized, as witnessed by the Soviet gulags or books by leftists such as Theodore Adorno et al, who published The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. The latter was a rather bogus study that argued that conservatives exhibited an authoritarian personality type. Funny coming from a group that rarely meets a totalitarian dictator they don’t admire: Stalin, Mao, Castro, all wonderful examples of humanity! This tendency to pathologize deviance and crime also extends to what I would call a “misplaced compassion” for career criminals and thugs. Such admiration is also amply displayed on bumper stickers: Free [input the latest celebrity criminal of the left].

But the bottom-line, so to speak, is that the new morality (some call it moral relativism) destroys individual responsibility. And while some determinists might contend that free will is a fiction, and if so, we cannot be held responsible for our actions, as William James has famously argued (The Will to Believe, 1896), the belief in free will and responsibility has great pragmatic value: How can one possibly be effective and successful in life if one does not believe that one has the freedom to act? To expand the point, just compare how successful and free societies are that believe in free will versus societies that ascribe to some form of determinism or fatalism. Also, to absolve the individual of freedom and responsibility devalues, de-humanizes, and infantilizes the individual. Without free and responsible individuals, how can we expect our democracy, which depends upon such individuals, to survive? Hayek quoted F.D. Wormuth as follows:

It is doubtful that democracy could survive in a society organized on the principle of therapy rather than judgment, error rather than sin. If men are free and equal, they must be judged rather than hospitalized. (Ibid., p.71)

The German thinker, Goethe, was rather prescient, when he wrote in a letter to Frau von Stein (June 8, 1787): “I think it is true that humanity will triumph eventually, only I fear that at the same time the world will become a large hospital and each will become the other’s humane nurse” (Quoted in W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 369).

A society of invalids and victims does not a free democratic republic make.