“I think the two of them were having a bit of good time having a debate like you had at 2 a.m. in the morning when you’re going to college, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with anything.” Jon Kyl on Rand Paul's appearance on the Maddow show.
Kyl seems to support the definition of Libertarianism I posted the other day. I don't deny that Libertarians are often very intelligent, but I also think that they are adolescent in their thinking and stunted in their sense of what it means to live in "society".That's not just a snark. I mean it quite literally. They are like bright high-school debaters who take a simple premise, and with relentless consistency develop an abstract one-dimensional system of thought they promote as "principled". And because they are often "bright", they find ingenious ways to explain everything through the lens of their unbalanced thinking. But in the end it's sophomoric nonsense embraced only by those who remain intellectually and socially stunted.
Libertarian one dimensionality is rooted in its assumption that Liberty is the only value that matters for Americans; it forgets that Equality is part of the picture, too. Libertarians make sense when they affirm things about Liberty we all agree are essential for the good health of American society. They stop makings sense, though, to the degree that they embrace Liberty as an absolute that diminishes the importance of Equality. It's not either Liberty or Equality. Both keep one another in a kind of tension and balance. When Liberty dominates, Equality suffers; when Equality dominates, Liberty suffers. A healthy democracy finds ways through use of its tools in the political sphere to keep the two in a rough balance.
In a healthy society, amity, or a peaceful balance, between freedom
and equality has implications for activity in the economic sphere. The
free exchange of goods and services is an essential element in the
healthy functioning of activity in the economic sphere, but, once again,
Liberty is not an absolute, and it must be checked when severe
inequalities in wealth (and the power that comes with it) emerge.
Neither is some rigid idea about Equality an absolute, and so, of
course, any healthy society would reject a program to implement a
top-down redistributionism in which some ideal of complete Equality was
the goal. The challenge is not to celebrate equality as preferable–or
liberty–but to find a balance point that defines social health, and the
health of activity in both the political sphere and the cultural sphere
depend on this balance being struck in the economic sphere.
My
longstanding argument on this blog has been that the genius of the
American experiment has been its struggle in fits and starts to find
this balance, and that while its failures have been egregious, what
makes this country interesting is its ability to correct course. The
social and economic imbalances that dominated American society in the
immediate post-Civil War period were corrected by the efforts of
Progressives in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which culminated
in the mixed economy compromise we call the New Deal consensus, which
created the conditions for the tremendous widespread prosperity through
the middle decades of the twentieth century.
This consensus was
accepted by Democrats and Republicans alike, and provided the framework
for civil discourse and honest disagreements about how best to manage
issues that came up within the political sphere. Right-wing extremists
had no credibility and were relegated to the fringe or were roundly
defeated as Goldwater was in '64. During this time the third-world
cultural and economic backwater which comprised the former Confederacy
was slowly integrated into the mainstream both economically and in terms
of insuring the civil rights of its African-American citizens. Nothing
is perfect, normal corruption and dirty dealing were always there, but
things were generally on track. Sure, there was some Liberal
over-reaching, but still enough common sense and pragmatism within the
consensus to make adjustments when needed.
All this changed with
the ascendancy of movement conservatism during the Reagan presidency
fueled by the backlash to the social and economic anxiety that
characterized the seventies. (See my post "How
Liberalism Got Its Bad Name" for my somewhat contrarian defense of
this era as Liberalism's finest moment.) The movement conservative
agenda was to destroy the New Deal framework and the amity between
equality and Liberty that it had established. And we are harvesting the
bitter fruits now. Those bitter fruits are egregious
economic inequalities, the mainstreaming of insane, extremist right
wing ideology, and the destruction of any civil framework for solving
real problems that Americans need to deal with.
The American
Civil War was the American archetype for this conflict, which was a clash of cultures in the economic and political spheres.
Southern elites saw the preservation and flourishing of their culture as
dependent economically on slaveholding. It was impossible for them to
separate out the political, economic, and cultural. They were all
enmeshed, and even many of those southerners who saw slavery as an evil
could not see a way out. At best they tried to ensure that slaves were
well treated, along the lines of an ASPCA for humans.
***
I've often presented myself as sympathetic to a Burkean Whiggishness
that isn't against progress, but against socially engineered progress.
And I understand and respect the arguments of principled conservatives
like Deneen
and Larison who
understand the destructive effects of modern Liberal thinking and the
policies that follow from it on living traditional values and
institutions. I, too, prefer organic growth to engineered growth, but
not all natural growths are benign. Sometimes the kind of growth we're
dealing with is cancerous and it needs aggressive intervention, and the
cure is often painful and the recovery prolonged. The Civil War comes to
mind.
We saw that kind of cancerous growth in the late 18th and
early 19th century as the slave economy of the south metastasized. Such a
"natural" growth needed intervention if the nation founded on
principles of equality and freedom was to flourish. After passage of the
Fugitive Slave Act and then Dred Scott in the 1850s, it became clear
that this cancerous growth within the body politic could not be
contained.
This is a clear instance in which the liberty rights
of white Southerners and equality rights of African Americans were out
of balance, and aggressive outside intervention was required to redress
the balance. I do not believe that this problem would have just worked
itself out over time, and the Feds were justified to intervene to
redress the balance. The idea that slavery would have just died out is ridiculous. After
Dred Scott, there was no preventing slavery from infecting the
North. If anything the Social Darwinist logic of the late 19th Century
would have justified the expansion of slavery into factories, mines, and
anywhere cheap labor would enhance profitability. Why deal with unions if you can just hire slaves?
Are conservatives justified in their concern
about imbalances in the other direction, when society becomes
imbalanced toward an equality and the leveling conformism that abusively
infringes on the liberty rights of individuals? Of course, but for the
most part this is an abstract straw-man argument in the contemporary
U.S. because there are minor nuisances, and they are played out more in
the cultural sphere than in the political sphere. And there are simply
no egregious imbalances that come even close to the inequality imbalance
suffered by Blacks in the south before the Civil War and during Jim
Crow.
For extreme Libertarians, any constraint on individual
liberty, even constraints that I would describe as attempts to find a
balance between liberty and equality, are considered tyrannical. So when
a Libertarian says, "I do not
see how libertarians and liberals can work together so long as
liberals seek to continually increase the state's power to plan society
and control the market," he's criticizing a theoretical straw man,
because there are very few Democrats or Liberals that fit the
description of seeking to "plan society and control the market." There's
no grand plan, that's a figment of the Libertarian imagination.
Liberalism in practice has been for the most part an ad hoc process to
use the government as a tool to fix problems that don't fix themselves.
Name a prominent politician who advocates total government control of
society and markets? Not even Bernie Sanders would advocate for that.
The
New Deal was not a socialist plot, but an attempt to find a balance
between free markets and a government role to mitigate the harmful
effects of free markets on the lives of ordinary Americans. The New Deal
introduced to the U.S. a mixed economy, not a socialist economy, and it
works, despite Republican attempts to dismantle it since Reagan. It can
be called socialist only by those who care not a whit about finding the
balance between liberty and equality. Again, it's not either/or; it's
about finding a balance. Reaganism and doctrinaire Libertarianism
represent a movement in the direction of Liberty that causes severe
imbalances when it comes to equality.
And if such Libertarians
were able to think objectively, they'd see, for instance, that a
single-payer system, if it's set up correctly, actually increases the
liberty of doctors and patients to make decisions, that it would deliver
providers from the tyranny of onerous paper work and interfering
insurance bureaucrats who veto physicians' decisions, and deliver
patients from the tyranny of insurance companies that deny needed
coverage on the flimsiest of pretexts because their goal is to minimize
payments to increase shareholder returns. Single payer is an example of
where a government role would increase liberty and equality
significantly, especially when compared to the current arrangements.
This
is another example of where the freedom of insurance companies comes
into conflict with both the freedom of consumers and their right to be
treated fairly. If insurance companies can't rectify their abusive m.o.
on their own, and why should they if no one forces them to, then
somebody has to force them, and the only entity with power to do that
is the government.
[Ed. note: the second half of this post is excerpted from a longer post entitled "Conservatives/Libertarians/Liberals".]
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