ANTI-WAR LIBERTARIANS: With all the attention paid in Blogland to the ravings of the anti-war left, it is curious that another nest of anti-war opinion has gone relatively ignored. That oversight is doubly curious when you consider how many of the leading bloggers are libertarianish in political orientation -- since it is within the libertarian ranks that this second strain of radical opposition to the war on terror can be found.
Denunciations of the war by people of libertarian views are splashed all over the web. Look, for example, at antiwar.com and lewrockwell.com, both run by the "Center for Libertarian Studies." And check out againstbombing.com, representing a "conservative/libertarian coalition opposed to the bombing which brings retaliation from enemies that we ourselves create, turning our free Republic into a military empire." I could go on and on and on.
Here’s a real eye-popper. The Independent Institute is a Bay Area libertarian think tank which claims as members of its Board of Advisors such libertarian luminaries as Nobel laureate James Buchanan, Richard Epstein, Charles Murray, and Walter Williams. On April 18, the institute is sponsoring a forum entitled "Understanding America’s Terrorist Crisis: What Should Be Done?" The moderator is none other than Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, who has condemned the war on terror as an "American jihad" in the pages of his magazine. And who is the featured speaker? The King of All America Haters, Gore Vidal himself!
What is going on? What’s wrong with these people? One can dismiss particular individuals or groups as disreputable or crankish, but the fact is that anti-war views similar to those held by the loonie left are not uncommon among libertarians these days.
It pains me to criticize fellow libertarians. There aren't nearly enough of us who have really absorbed and understood Hayek’s message about the creative power of spontaneous order and the limits of centralized control, or who grasp in a principled and consistent way the moral superiority of persuasion over force. These are ideas in which I believe passionately -- and which I believe have the power, if not to save the world, at least to extend its blessings and reduce its miseries on a revolutionary scale. I'm willing to cut people who share this passion a lot of slack.
But if I applaud lefties like Christopher Hitchens and Michael Walzer who have the guts to take on their anti-war pals -- and I most assuredly do -- then shouldn't I follow their example? When people from the same area code of the political spectrum that I inhabit fall prey to views I consider to be disastrously wrongheaded, I feel obliged to say something.
THE ANARCHIST DELUSION: When a set of ideas yields a horribly mistaken response to an absolutely critical question, there's something fundamentally wrong with those ideas. That’s the situation, as I see it, with the species of libertarianism that has given rise to anti-war sentiment.
The first and most obvious problem is the dogmatically anti-interventionist foreign policy touted by many libertarians. There is a clear conflict between such a vision of foreign policy and the effective prosecution of the present war on terror, and libertarians who oppose the war have recognized that conflict and decided to go down with the anti-interventionist ship.
I've posted already about the shortcomings of the non-intervention principle -- or any other general principle, for that matter -- as a practical guide to sound foreign policy. Nothing could illustrate those shortcomings more vividly than the reality-evading nonsense that anti-war libertarians are putting out in defense of that principle’s present applicability. Take a look at those websites I cited if you doubt me.
Why is the anti-interventionist idea so important to these people that they’ll twist themselves into knots to stick with it? At the root of the problem, I think, is the refusal of many libertarians to accept the legitimacy of the state as the guarantor of our liberty. There is, of course, a streak of anarchist thinking that runs through the contemporary libertarian movement. And many libertarians who don’t go the whole anarchist nine yards still harbor a deep-seated hostility to the state as an institution. Their beef isn't just with excessive government, it's with the whole idea of government.
If you don't accept the legitimacy of the state, you can never really embrace the necessity of war -- since war is inescapably an affair of state. You can support your local police force on the idea that it just needs to be privatized -- as if would be, of course, in your anarcho-libertarian utopia. But huge armies with aircraft carriers and Apache attack helicopters and cruise missiles and tanks and a million young men in arms? That can't be in private hands, can it? War machines are creatures of the state -- and therefore inherently suspect.
If you're in this frame of mind, there's great pressure to conclude that there's no need for big militaries that can project force overseas. To maintain your animus against the state, you've got to convince yourself that Swiss-style militias are all you need to get by in the world. And that any threats which might require a more muscular response would just go away if we'd only keep our nose out of other people's business.
Furthermore, it's very easy to drift from anti-state libertarianism into outright anti-Americanism. After all, if all states are bad, and the American state is the biggest, most powerful state in the history of the world, then it must be pretty rotten -- right? You become increasingly comfortable with the idea that all our enemies are our own fault -- the "blowback" of our illegitimate pursuit of "empire." Before you know it, you're sucking up to monsters like Gore Vidal.
Anarcho-libertarianism is delusional. We may claim our rights on moral grounds, but we enjoy them only by virtue of government. In the real world, life without government isn’t a libertarian paradise, it’s Somalia. Of course the dependence of liberty on government is tragic, because of the problem of "who guards the guardians?" But whoever said life was easy?
Anti-state libertarians fail to grasp the great paradox of human freedom: its ultimate dependence upon raw force. Consequently, they don’t fully understand the nature of what they so sincerely and admirably treasure -- because they don’t recognize where it comes from and what sustains it. And when raw force is called for to defend liberty from external threats, anti-state libertarians are prone to betraying their own cause.
WHY THIS MATTERS: Who cares what a tiny fringe of libertarians thinks about the war? They're clearly having no impact on public opinion or government policy. And unlike their comrades against arms on the left, they hold no positions of cultural power. So why can't we just ignore them?
Because the libertarian movement is important. Poor kids in terrible government-run schools desperately need another choice. Working folks whose retirement savings go down the rathole of Social Security desperately need to have control of their own money. And on an entirely different scale of desperation, the three billion people who live on less than $2 a day need the hope and opportunities that only liberal policies and institutions can provide.
People who understand the moral and practical case for liberty are important. They're ahead of the historical curve, and therefore in a position to make a huge difference. It's a terrible waste to squander that opportunity by discrediting the case for liberty with the baggage of a flawed ideology.
brinklindsey.com |
