Libertarians and Tocqueville
I want to give credit to Adam Wolfson for a pretty good line from his article in The Public Interest:
"Libertarians rise to the defense of every conceivable freedom but that of self-government; they typically tend to be pro-abortion, pro-drug legalization, pro-human cloning, and so on. Their goal, also ardently advanced by the postmodern Left, is the expansion of individual choice. But the "right to choose" has generally been secured in contemporary America only by enacting a judicial prohibition, one that forbids individuals from acting together to determine what laws they shall live under."
(Link via Jonah Goldberg on The Corner).
I would paraphrase as follows: libertarians think we should be free to do everything except deliberate on public policy and act on our deliberations; we'll leave that to the courts.
This is relevant to the course I'm teaching on U.S. Constitutional law. For the second semester we are moving from "Institutions" to "Rights," and there is a striking tendency to libertarianism in the cases on speech, religion, and privacy. (Update: Professor Randy Barnett, among others, likes it that way). (The old sense of radical freedom for economic or market transactions, captured most famously in the Lochner decision, is not back in fashion, but scholars are certainly noting a connection between it and the privacy cases).
I want the students to be able to articulate some sense of what might be wrong with the libertarian cases. What are we losing or missing? Of course they can still agree with the cases if they want to, but I want to see some sense of a real debate--intelligent people might be on the other side.
For the most part I have to stick to constitutional issues. Even if we don't like a particular piece of legislation, it might be that constitutionally a legislature or Congress have the right to pass and enforce it.
Beyond that, though, is the loss of a sense that democratic citizens might have intelligent things to say about how a community should live.
I was fortunate to attend a lecture by Harvey Mansfield of Harvard on Tocqueville on Friday, and I'm thinking now of handing out a reading (probably towards the end of the semester) on "individualism." (Wolfson mentions Tocqueville as well).
Update: Tocqueville's discussion of individualism in Democracy in America (Vol. II, Pat II) remains unique. I don't have the new translation by Mansfield and his wife Delba Winthrop, but here goes: "Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself."
This doesn't sound so bad; live and let live. But Tocqueville says this "inward-looking" life is based on "misguided judgment," and it "dams the spring of public virtues"--which would make us care actively about large numbers of our fellow citizens. Although different from egoism--a passionate preference for oneself over all others, individualism gradually merges into egoism.
In the U.S. today there is both a right and a left, and then there are economic issues and social issues. Libertarians are on the right on economics--as little regulation, and as few taxes, as possible--but on the left on social issues. They at least have a logical consistency that other groups may lack. They oppose "statism".
Why do conservatives tend to be on the right on social issues? Because they have some respect for traditional views and practices when it comes to "value" questions, and they think there is some public benefit in passing and enforcing laws that limit individual freedom in the name of morality, or even religion. There is always room in this position for a slightly cynical or detached view: it is not so much that specific traditions are true, or the best possible, but that ongoing maintenance of such traditions, accompanied by debate and yes, change, is healthy.
Why are many of these same conservatives prepared to be for "freedom" when it comes to economics? Partly, no doubt, they are persuaded by the success of capitalism in generating wealth for a great many people, and opportunity for many of the poor. In many cases, government cannot react quickly enough to help people as effectively as the market will, and regulations may actually stand in the way.
Defending capitalism is not really "conservative". Capitalism brings "creative destruction," and a world where "the only constant is change." It constantly undermines the traditional family, and has done a great deal to bring us from extended family to nuclear, to more or less tentative or scattered families. Thoughtful conservatives, however, are more concerned to maintain "moral" debates about social issues themselves, taken in isolation, than they are in connection with the market. Unlike Marx, they do not think economics itself, as powerful as it can be, is fundamental.
It strikes me today that libertarians are very comfortable in the individualist world, where it is really a very few individuals who matter, and one may not bother voting, much less debating issues. But they can't help but find this world dry, dessicated, limiting, even stunted. As Aristotle and Tocqueville would both say, there is a natural desire to say how we should live together as a society--what family life should be like, how we should recognize God. (Presumably worship proper should remain private in a liberal society). Modern government is "enlightened" insofar as it replaces "rule based on opinion"--the old narrow bigoted cities, or the old uncompromising religions--with rule by representatives, whose job is to carry out certain functions, more than to tell us what to do. But it does not seem healthy to cut ourselves off from the old debates completely.
So we have libertarians who become war-bloggers. Let's use a huge army to push people around, kill some of them, confiscate their weapons, tell them how to educate both boys and girls, and impose a curfew. But, er, not in my back yard. Somewhere else, like Iraq. War in an exotic country provides an outlet for all the old "political" desires, which are embarrassingly moralistic and imperialistic.
[Update: or I should say: they require, and reinforce, a sense of belonging to a community that is bigger and more important than oneself].
Social liberals act and speak as though, if we allow a display of the Ten Commandments, next we will have Christian mobs burning heretics. Some of them, and in particular some of the libertarians, now seem to enjoy having a clear enemy who can be described as evil, and so on, practically as an infidel from the point of view of freedom rather than the New Testament. They don't seem to mind if Bush, to some degree, invents an enemy, because it will be so enjoyable to have an outlet for all these feelings.
Maybe we would be saner if we had a bit more rational debate on social issues here at home.
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