Libertarian: personal ideology or political brand?

In some ways there is nothing funnier than watching the members of minor political parties fight their hearts out for control of something significantly less than 1% of the hearts and minds of the electorate.

Unless, of course, it's the party you would like to build into a viable major party.

So the current debate, most easily accessed over at Third Party Watch, between Libertarian reformers and radicals is ... not so funny.

Notwithstanding the fact that I have already declared myself a "pragmatic" Libertarian and joined the Libertarian Reform Caucus, I have to admit that I find this whole infighting spectacle over the Libertarian Platform to be not only unseemly, but frankly idiotic.

It's idiotic because the Radical Libertarians are talking about an ideology, and the Reform Libertarians are talking about a political party, and the two sides are apparently unaware that they're both equally ... wrong or right.

Let me explain.

Within the current Demopublican monopoly there is a Democratic Party and a Republican Party. While the terms Democrat and Republican are rough indicators of a specific span of the simplified political spectrum, neither is an ideology. Among the Democrats, for example, there are progressives, liberals, and moderates, each sub-group representing a more or less separate ideological approach to politics and social policy; among the Republicans are social conservatives, Christian conservatives, fiscal conservatives, free market libertarians, and so on.

Ideologies are the personal belief systems of individuals and groups of people; major political parties are the umbrella organizations that gather together roughly similar or compatible ideological groups into a large enough mass to represent a significant political force.

The only time that an ideology is the same thing as a political party is when the party is so small (and therefore so inconsequential) that it can't attract anyone else. Let's think here: the Greens, the Socialists, etc. etc.

The very toughest challenge is when an parts of an ideology become attractive enough to a sufficient number of people that it threatens to break out and become a real political party. Then the ideological purists, far from being elated over their success in attracting fellow travelers with whom they could erect a big tent, become irritably possessive of the true faith. The fellow travelers, who expected a warm welcome, recoil in hurt and anger.

Here's the gist of the difference between Radical Libertarians (the ideologues) and Reform Libertarians (the political activists):

Radicals are pursuing a clean vision of vanishing government and a society built on the predicate of absolute individual responsibility for life's outcomes.

Reformers believe more generally that simultaneously increasing economic and personal freedom will create a climate of prosperity, but also believe that a limited government has a role to play.

Which group is more likely to recruit in large numbers?

The problem for the Reform Libertarians is that they need the party name at the same time they need to be able to distance themselves at least a bit from the ideology.

The Libertarian "brand" is valuable because it is a recognizable, long-term political identifier in US politics, both as a subset of the Conservative movement and as the country's (far behind) third largest political party. If the Reformers have to strike out on their own as the Freedom Party, or the Justice Party, or even join the Constitutional Party, their objective of becoming a major political party will be set back for years just by virtue of inferior name recognition.

Libertarian ideology, on the other hand, carries a lot of baggage, precisely because it can be so easily caricatured by employing the stances of unadulterated Lysander Spooner, Ayn Rand, F. A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, or (as Ron Paul is discovering) Lew Rockwell (whether writing as himself or somebody else).

Here's just one vituperative sample of how Radical Libertarianism has been repeatedly and successfully trashed by the Progressive Left, Luc Loranhe's The Fallacies of Libertarian Politics:

Libertarians typically are anti-government. Not anti a specific government, but anti-government per se. They dream of a world in which people everywhere just can decide for themselves, and small groups can enjoy total self-rule.

However, just as nihilism advocating happy suicide, a Libertarian theory that advocates the non existence of governments, will never become mainstream. For a philosophical idea that advocates the non-existence of its disciples will constantly eradicate itself. And a political idea that basically preaches huge power vacuums will always just prepare the ground for the next power grabber.

I even doubt that most Libertarians are genuinely anti-government. Rather, I believe that they are anti-government because they have, erroneously, learned that any government infringes on the personal freedom of the citizens it rules, and they assume that the more government we have, the more infringement.

But this would not have to be the case. I can well imagine a strong government, backed by a strong ideological movement organized as a political party, which considers granting the people of a country optimal personal freedom its most essential responsibility.

OK, at this point you are probably thinking, "Who'd believe this simplistic parody?" The answer (as I found out when I started this blog): lots of people, and the further to the Left they are, the more credible they find it.

Better yet, try Seth Finkelstein's 1997 essay, Libertarianism Makes You Stupid, from which a few key excerpts follow:

The idea that Libertarians don't believe in the initiation of force is pure propaganda. They believe in using force as much as anyone else, if they think the application is morally correct. "initiation of force" is Libertarian term of art, meaning essentially "do something improper according to Libertarian ideology". It isn't even connected much to the actions we normally think of as "force". The question being asked above was really agree or disagree, that it is always wrong for one person to do something improper according to Libertarian ideology. It was just phrased in their preaching way.

While you might be told Libertarianism is about individual rights and freedom, fundamentally, it's about business. The words "individual rights", in a civil-society context, are often Libertarian-ese for "business". That's what what they derive as the inevitable meaning of rights and freedom, as a statement of principles:

Since governments, when instituted, must not violate individual rights, we oppose all interference by government in the areas of voluntary and contractual relations among individuals.

The whole idea of a contract is that government enforces relations among individuals. The above sentence is a nonsensical, it's conceptually that they oppose all interference by government in the areas of government enforcing relations among individuals.

The key to understanding this, and to understanding Libertarianism itself, is to realize that their concept of individual freedom is the "whopper" of "right to have the State back up business". That's a wild definition of freedom. If you voluntarily contract to sell all your future income for $1, they then oppose all government "interference" with your "right" to do this. It's a completely twisted, utterly inverted, perfectly Orwellian statement, almost exactly "Freedom is Slavery".

This is not at all obvious or what people tend to think when they're told the song and dance about rights and freedoms. This point about contract and Libertarianism needs to be stressed. Often, the "chain of logic" used by a Libertarian will be a fairly valid set of deductions. But along the way, there will be very subtle assumptions slipped in, such as "contract" (meaning business) as a fundamental right. It can be quite difficult to spot, such as a redefinition of terms, or a whopper like the above. But again, it's very "logical", very "axiomatic".

Unfortunately, while this is a caricature, it is one drawn from Libertarian ideological rhetoric, and there are even some of the Radical Purists who manage to fall into semantic traps like this.

Here's one more example (I had more in mind, but I'm starting to feel queasy):

One of the seamiest and ugliest aspects of Libertarianism is its support of turning back the civil-rights clock to pre-1964 legal situation for businesses. "I am not making this up". They're very explicit about it:

Consequently, we oppose any government attempts to regulate private discrimination, including choices and preferences, in employment, housing, and privately owned businesses. The right to trade includes the right not to trade -- for any reasons whatsoever; the right of association includes the right not to associate, for exercise of the right depends upon mutual consent.

That's "rights" according to Libertarianism. Whites-only lunch counters, "No Jews or dogs" hotels, "we don't serve your kind here", "No Irish need apply", "This is man's job", etc. All this is a "right of association" in Libertarian theology.
Such a weird position is not just the purview of some position-writers in a corner, but a surprisingly common trait of Libertarians. It's one of the surest way of identifying one, if they justify such a reactionary position from abstract considerations.

It must be stressed that a) Libertarians ARE NOT racists, sexists, etc. and b) The above is not meant to comment either way on the much more controversial affirmative-action debate. Libertarians can go to town whenever they're called racist, sexist, and so on for the above (gee, how could anyone ever get that idea?), proclaiming their great personal but private commitment to equality. Of course, they never have to do anything much in this regard since events have passed them by. But they want make sure you know they fully support the ideals, even if they think that all the past decades legal effort should be repealed as immoral and unprincipled. They also love to switch the debate to affirmative action, because that's far more contentious than anti-discrimination. But the position's very plain. Drinking from the wrong water fountain would presumably be "initiation of force", allowing retaliation of force to eject the malefactor.

What Finkelstein is doing (as several commentators have tried to do to me) is take the most radical possible application of Libertarian philosophy, extend it to its most ludicrous extent, and then assign it as the basic principle upon which all Libertarians operate.

That's akin to saying that anyone who believes in certain Marxist economic principles therefore sanctions mass killing as practiced by Stalin and Mao.

But our Libertarian ideologues, in pursuit of a perfectly principled and ideologically consistent position, provide fodder for the beast by repeatedly advocating extreme (and extremely impractical) positions as if they constituted simple logic that any non-retarded third grader should be able to see.

Don't get me wrong: I respect our Libertarian purists and ideologues, and I agree in the abstract that if we could one day achieve any utopia the Libertarian utopia is the one I'd most like to live in.

Since neither I nor my children is going to live in that utopia, I plan to spend the rest of my life working toward the idea of increasing personal and economic freedom within the context of the government we have and the country I love.

And to do that, I'm going to have to join the Reformers in appropriating the Libertarian "brand" for some practical work.