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 | Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 14:33:16 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
Paul, do you read Samizdata.net by any chance?
Over the last two months, there were two posts on that site where the Libertarians there were grappling with exactly the problems we would expect them to have -- issues that stem from their refusal to acknowledge the need for a specific moral foundation to their politics.
In the first one, they were asking themselves how to deal with their primary Achilles heel question: the accusation that Libertarians would "let people starve in the streets."
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2008/04/getting_over_th.html
In the second, they were discussing that precise article by Alex Singleton.
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2008/05/samizdata_quote_357.html
I posted on both of those, IMO doing a better job on the second one, to wit:
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Perry de Havilland writes:
**I would have to disagree with Alex completely**
All comment, no substance.
What Singleton is pointing out is that insisting on putting your constituency into its own party instead of having it be a force *within* the mainstream parties, can in fact severely limit your influence. This is a pattern that has shown itself more than once in political history.
The best example I know of is that of the abolitionist movement in America. American abolitionist Lydia Marie Child, who wrote in her 1842 book "Talk about Political Party", wrote as quoted here by Gus Van Horn: http://gusvanhorn.blogspot.com/2008/01/indeed-indeed.html
***A.But you advise people not to vote for pro-slavery candidates, and not to join the liberty party; if this isn't non-resistance in politics, I don't know what is.
B. The difficulty in your mind arises, I think, from want of faith in the efficiency of moral influence. You cannot see that you act on politics at all, unless you join the caucus, and assist in electioneering for certain individuals; whereas you may, in point of fact, refuse co-operation, and thereby exert a *tenfold influence on the destiny of parties.*
***
(Emphasis mine.)
The second example is the history of the Left in America. It is often pointed out that socialism never got votes in the United States. This is only true if we note that a "Socialist" party has never taken hold here. But when you examine socialist principles on a case-by-case basis, from the stated programs of these unelected parties through history, most of them have by now been implemented, piecemeal, by both Republicans and Democrats -- the latter most consistently so, thanks to their now largely socialistic base.
In each case, it is philosophy -- specifically, moral philosophy -- which is the driving force. The Abolitionists had the lingering influence of the Enlightenment and its moral justifications for individual rights, to draw upon; the Left had the dominant morality of altruism on their side as they advanced their goals under color of "helping the poor". Political action is the end of that process, not its efficient cause. It is this key issue which is cited by Objectivists on why they are not Libertarians -- and why Libertarianism must fail.
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Note in particular the link to Gus Van Horn, who draws the instructive connection between the Libertarians' and the Abolitionists' approach to their particular challenges. |
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| Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 17:30:44 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: steven
That Ayn Rand Q and A on Libertarianism was embarrasing. She sounds like a fundamentalist preacher at a revival, tearing in to those who disagree. Sorry, Paul, but that's a poor way to try to convince people that you're right and they're wrong. |
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| Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 18:07:24 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Bob Sanders
E-mail: Sanders101(at)clc.net
Unlike Steven, I found Ayn Rand's thoughts on libertarians to be on the money. She had such incredible insight. But she writes this:
"The anarchist is the scum of the intellectual world of the left, which has given them up. So the right picks up another leftist discard."
which I find interesting. I have been reading for some time now how there have been various realignments among political movements; ie how the Classical Liberals migrated to the Right, how the Neo-Cons migrated to the Right, how the Conservatives, which historically were pro-religion and pro-feudalism, became associated with capitalism and liberalism, and now how the anarchists moved from the left to the right. It would be interesting to know the exact history of anarchism and of Classical liberalism as well as "libertarianism" and how they came to exist simultaneously under the big tent of "Conservatism." That label really has become meaningless. |
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| Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 20:37:51 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Ryan Krause
E-mail: rakrause(at)indiana.edu
I'm just finishing up a seminar with 80 or so libertarians that I had to attend for my summer internship. While I agreed with Rand's assertion about them, it wasn't until I was immersed in a virtual swarm of them, half Chicago School Theorists, half Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists, that the point really drove home. Although, I will say that I met several people who were turned off of Objectivism by the over-zealous Objectivist students they met on campus, and I believe I have at least reversed the negative impressions in four or five of them, if not totally convinced a couple. Libertarianism, while useless as a political (and many members also use it as a philosophical) movement, includes many honest, freedom-loving people who have a skewed impression of the philosophy. There might be opportunity to reach some of them. |
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| Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 20:45:25 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: kishnevi
E-mail: kishnevi(at)yahoo.com
URL: http://kishnevi.wordpress.com/
stepping in here as a libertarian who is not an Objectivist and not a member of the LP (I'll vote for Barr more or less as a protest vote because I can't bring myself to vote for either of the two major candidates, but I'm highly unimpressed with the LP's abilities as a political party)--I think Rand's analysis was based on the wrong grounds. In our political system, compromise is necessary; if you don't compromise you don't get anywhere. What you want to do is to make sure that compromises tend more and more to your view of the question. Mr. May in comment 1 illustrates that point exactly. Part of the LP's ineffectiveness is tied to the insistence of certain core groups that there be no compromise, which results in a political party whose aim seems to be not electing any candidates to office. To the extent that compromise is wrong, our entire political system is wrong.
I have no knowledge of the LP as it was during the period that Rand stated her views on it--I was still in high school during the Nixon years, and although at some time during that period I read Atlas Shrugged at the suggestion of a neighbor, it didn't make any signficant impression on me that I can recall. My first real acquaintance with Objectivism came in my twenties, and my real knowledge of libertarianism came well after that. The changes of twenty and thirty years do make it possible for her strictures to be entirely accurate then but inaccurate now. I also disagree with her view that political campaigning is not a valid educational tool; I think that in fact it is now a very good tool (although again perhaps circumstances have changed enough in the intervening years that Ms. Rand was accurate then, but would not be accurate now). And I am sure that, altough Ms. Rand might still want to disclaim any connection to libertarianism, libertarians seem very happy to quote Ms. Rand by name, so the plagiarism accusation no longer stands. (She might argue they misuse her even if they explicitly quote her--if 'misuse' consists in using only her political formulations without reference to any of the rest of Objectivism, that would be true, but true only if that really is misuse.)
As for Mr. Sanders's confusion over terminology--libertarians view themselves as being the modern embodiment of "classical Liberals". As for the anarchism--I think Ms. Rand was befuddled by the use of the term by two entirely different groups. Anarchism of the left is very much rooted in collectivist ideas. Anarchism of the true libertarian type is based on the premise that capitalism (as Ms. Rand thought of it) could adequately perform even the limited functions which Ms. Rand though were the proper sphere of government.
If the best government is the most minimal government possible, then theoretically a government that does not exist at all is the best government, if such a situation could exist in the real world. (I don't think it could. If nothing else, in such a "non government" society, the organizations that carry out the defense of rights would be the government, even if they were run on a capitalist basis of free market competition and no one used the word "government" to refer to them.) To avoid being confused with collectivist anarchists, libertarian anarchists tend to refer to themselves as AnarchoCapitalists (AnCaps). And, I might add, the proportion of AnarchoCapitalists who claim to be disciples of Rand is fairly high. |
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| Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 20:52:41 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
Bob: what you are seeing there is a series of reminders not to ascribe any significant meaning to the terms "left" and "right" except as designating the two "sides" of politics. The "spectrum" conveys as much meaning as the color of the jerseys on two opposing football teams -- it identifies what team each player is on, and nothing else.
The label of Conservatism has by no means become meaningless; on the contrary, conservatism has always been at core a reaction against the Enlightenment. It traces its genesis to the anti-Enlightenment reaction of the religious clerics and their intellectual supporters whose world was rocked by the Enlightenment.
The presence of the remnants of that latter movement, which I call "Americanism", under the Conservative tent is only about fifty years old at the most, an arrangement born of political expediency as genuine liberalism was kicked out of its own house by the Left in the 1960's. When it became clear that the hippies were the future of "liberalism" (read: socialism under the liberal banner), those who were too genuinely liberal to accept this moved across the aisle to the "conservative" movement, who saw in them an opportunity to gain ground against the new socialists by declaring Americanism to be a "conservative" virtue.
Alas, the inexorable logic of ideas is not to be denied. Conservatism was never comfortable with the liberal ideas in its house, for good reason. Eventually, it must resolve the contradiction, one way or the other, by one of these two options:
1. It accepts classical liberalism and therefore becoming something other than conservatism
2. It twists and subverts Americanism into something it is not, and spits out the parts that won't bend.
There are some who are trying for the first option; Bill Quick's http://americanconservativeparty.org/ and Jon Henke's www.thenextright.com are such attempts. At best, these will fail for the same reasons the Libertarians do -- they lack philosophical grounding. At worst, they will merely attempt to wrest the title of "conservatism" away from the ones in charge of the Republican Party, without challenging any of that movement's basic flaws -- which amounts to nothing more than a power struggle.
Either way, the American ideals of constrained government and individual rights simply cannot rest on conservatism's religious base, anymore than on the Left's nihilist/determinist base. The only active philosophical base that can sustain those ideas is the Objectivist one. |
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| Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 21:25:26 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
Hi kishnevi,
There can be no argument for or against "compromise" unless you differentiate between "compromise" as in accomodations between people of divergent viewpoints but with a common goal, and "compromise" as in the subversion of a principle -- "to compromise one's integrity".
What's more, is that it's funny that you should be trying that old saw again, when there are comments like this one on the second Samizdata thread I pointed out:
Posted by lpdbw at May 31, 2008 08:07 PM
"I came at it from the Randian perspective, though I am not a complete kool-aid drinker there. For instance, I couldn't swallow Ayn Rand's view that we had to work within the existing parties..."
In other words, there's a Libertarian who thinks Rand was too accomodating of the existing order! Treating this kind of stubbornness as equivalent to th Objectivist moral intransigence which underlies our refusal to compromise our principles, betrays an ingorance of what principles are, and the role they play in human thought.
So long as you cannot distinguish between principles and arbitrary stubbornness, you won't be able to resolve the problem -- you'll end up choosing between a perpetually marginalized LP, and one that is so compromised as to be "Libertarian" only in name. I strongly suggest you follow the link to Gus Van Horn's blog and read the entire post there. |
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| Thursday, June 12, 2008 at 22:30:24 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: Jim may
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
In the above, strike "again" from the phrase "trying that old saw again,", as I don't know of any earlier discussions of this issue by kishnevi.
Funny how over-editing a post leads to the need for... a comment editing facility ;( |
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| Friday, June 13, 2008 at 0:52:20 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: Paul Hsieh
E-mail: paul(at)geekpress(dot)com
URL: http://www.geekpress.com
Ryan: I definitely agree that there are better libertarians in the sense that they would be amenable to principled philosophical arguments to support their political views. And it can definitely be worth trying to reach them. But I also believe that one cannot reach them from within libertarian organizations. Instead, the best approach is to make one's case in other venues, and let the good ones come to you. For what it's worth, I've seen this happen in our local Colorado group, to great success. |
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| Friday, June 13, 2008 at 12:45:47 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: O'is Post Grad
E-mail: post&Go(at)yahoo.com
"The label of Conservatism has by no means become meaningless; on the contrary, conservatism has always been at core a reaction against the Enlightenment."
This is true. Historically, religious thinkers where shocked and scared at the ground Enlightenment ideas were gaining; those ideas largely stemming from British thinkers such as Locke, Bacon and Newton (sometimes Hume is clumped in here but I wouldn't include him). The religious resented the fact that the Enlightenment sold itself as a rebirth of reason and that it argued that the 1000 year reign of religion since the fall of Antiquity was a period of superstitious primitivism. The religious medievalists thought that the Dark and Middle Ages was the pinnacle of culture and civilization and today's medievalists think the same thing. So they hated the Enlightenment thinkers because they rejected religion and feudalism and because they were "arrogant" enough to label their movement an Enlightenment (implying the previous era was darkness).
Then comes along the German counter-Enlightenment scholars such as Kant, Hegel, Herder, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Scleiermacher, etc, etc. Most of these Germans were deeply religious men who loathed the Enlightenment because it threatened religion and the feudal order (also because all of its leading intellectuals were British! "No philosophical race are the English" says Nietzsche.) They each would do their part to discredit reason and limit its influence opening the door for both the modern subjectivist Left and the Religious Right. Even a Christian like Dinesh D'souza quotes Kant as having "proven" that reason is limited.
So Conservatism as a label has always stood for defending religion and the old, rigid, feudal order against the new, individualist, rational, capitalistic liberalism which was the product of the Enlightenment. It was a mistake for Classical Liberals to ever join the Conservative movement. (Incidentally, I think this is another reason why it would be a mistake for Objectivists to join the libertarian political movement. The Classical Liberals didn't benefit from becoming "Conservatives" and Objectivists wouldn't benefit from becoming "Libertarians.") |
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| Friday, June 13, 2008 at 16:22:55 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
Oist Post Grad writes:
"It was a mistake for Classical Liberals to ever join the Conservative movement."
This is true. However, it is worth noting that they only really did that here in the United States. This is because the individualistic aspect of the Enlightenment went much deeper in America than elsewhere; when socialism became ascendant, it was able to take root on the Continent, displacing the old "bourgeois liberalism" there, to the point that the latter was completely gone by the onset of World War I.
In 19th century America, however, socialism was rejected outright, as it ought to be. To make inroads here, the Left had to find an alternate, sneakier path in; it found this path in the American liberals' lack of philosophical grounding. It proceeded to co-opt that movement from within, beginning with Herbert Croly and the Progressives, and then culminating with the end of American liberalism in the 1960's.
That is why "liberalism" now means "socialism" in the US, but still means something close to its original meaning of "limited government and capitalism" elsewhere (but is a fringe movement for the most part). |
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| Friday, June 13, 2008 at 16:46:08 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: O'is Post Grad
E-mail: post&Go(at)yahoo.com
"That is why "liberalism" now means "socialism" in the US, but still means something close to its original meaning of "limited government and capitalism" elsewhere (but is a fringe movement for the most part)."
Good point and I agree. I think this is also why there is no "Conservative" movement in Europe. And by that I mean a movement with Classical Liberal elements playing a significant (even if watered down) role. Europe's Right seems to be a bunch of racist, nationalist types obsessed with a return to a "white Christian Europe." There are a number of these in America but to the best of my knowledge they represent only a small percentage of American Conservatives although one could argue that many PaleoConservatives such as Pat Buchanan are really just watered down white, Christian nationalists. |
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