Nick Tyrone's Blog, page 14

Why libertarianism doesn’t work and the progressive theory of history

Some people think I’m a libertarian. That’s because either libertarians think I’m one of them, or many on the left believe this to be my creed, which obviously makes me evil. But no, I’m not a libertarian. I used to describe myself as a classical liberal until that helpful term got hijacked by parts of the right and even the far-right. So now, I’m just a liberal. Which is different from being a libertarian.

I believe in the power of the individual over the collective. Often this means favouring keeping the state out of something and allowing the private sector to run it – but not always. For instance, I like having a single payer health system because I think that is what is best for the individual. As an example of this, several years ago my son started having seizures. The doctors weren’t sure why, testing him for everything relevant. We put him on several medications, none of which worked. He was in and out of the hospital all of the time. Thankfully, we eventually found a medication that worked, the seizures stopped, they found there was nothing seriously wrong with him and after a couple of years, we were able to wean him off the medication. He hasn’t had a seizure in almost three years now.

During that period of time, I changed jobs and in fact became a freelance contractor. Had we had a system like the US, I wouldn’t and more to the point, couldn’t have done this; the risk of quitting a job that in the States would have been attached to my health care insurance would have been too great given what was happening with my son. Having the NHS allowed me to do what I wanted instead of what I had to do career-wise. It was a great example of something state run allowing me freedom as an individual as well as the chance to do something more entrepreneurial.

This is my first problem with libertarianism – it presumes that the case I outlined above is impossible. That the state is only there to provide a military/police apparatus and otherwise it is overreaching. Nothing state run can empower the individual, they believe. This stems from a belief amongst libertarians that the free market is perfect; that anytime a problem arises that is perceived to be caused by the market it is only because the market in question isn’t free enough. In other words, if libertarianism doesn’t work, it is only because what is being tried isn’t real libertarianism. Yes, you got it: that does sound a lot like the excuse given for why 20th century socialism was a nightmare – because in every wretched case, it supposedly wasn’t real socialism.

Yet those are the problems that are most often talked about in relation to libertarianism already. One not discussed at all – as far as I’ve ever come across – is that libertarians lean very heavily on the progressive theory of history while consciously dispelling the idea. In other words, they reject the progressive theory of history while baking it heavily into what they believe and even using to support their ideology.

If you ask a libertarian why countries without a functioning state, such as post-Soviet Afghanistan or Somalia, are not bastions of libertarianism but rather violent messes that often become dictatorships when people inevitably seek security, they will fall back on the idea that they don’t believe in lawless societies, just ones in which the state is simultaneously strong enough to enforce the law yet free enough to still be libertarian. Yet this doesn’t get round the problem presented here, which is that libertarianism isn’t a natural state of being for humans; some sort of default setting that occurs as soon as the state gets out of everyone’s way. This leads next to a key paradox: if libertarianism doesn’t naturally occur when the state apparatus is removed and yet the whole point of libertarianism is that you don’t have a state imposing things on people, how does real libertarianism ever come into being?

This is where the progressive theory of history makes its grand entrance. Yes, libertarians concede, social democracy might have served the minor purpose of stabilising society – but we don’t need it to do that anymore since we are now civilised enough not to need it. In other words, what would be different about a newly libertarian Britain versus a state in Africa that has become libertarian by accident is that Britain is further along on the progressive arrow of history. We wouldn’t regress as a society because we’ve got over all that stuff already. We wouldn’t start killing each other for the basic reason that we don’t do that sort of thing anymore. Once a society becomes civilised, in other words, it never goes backwards. How things like Nazi Germany fit into the equation is problematic here, but let’s not digress. To summarise: libertarianism doesn’t occur naturally in human society but can supposedly be progressed to once peace and stability have been established – because once a society becomes civilised it never rolls back from that state of being. Except of course, it does, and this has happened many, many times throughout history.

To be fair to libertarians, this false, unconscious leaning on the progressive theory of history is also used by the paleoconservatives and the Eurosceptic Right. For the paleoconservatives, if we rolled back liberalism, we wouldn’t find women’s rights eroded or newly revamped homophobia rampant because we’ve overcome that stuff and can’t go socially backward. For the Eurosceptic Right, European countries will never got to war with each other ever again because we’ve all progressed past that sort of stuff.

History shows us nations either find a way to trade with one another or they try and kill each other (although, in fairness, this isn’t actually binary; you can trade with each other and start trying to kill each other, but the trading makes the latter far less likely). And trading with each another isn’t the default, it’s the killing each other option, unfortunately. And in order to trade with one another, we need rules and regulations, usually quite a few of them. And this means you need states that do more than just have militaries and police forces. Free trade, like peaceful, functioning societies, are not the natural state of things. In order to have them, you need not only countries with functioning, highly developed systems of government but other countries with the same willing to come to supranational arrangements that everyone abides by. It turns out we need structures, both national and international, that are pretty complex in order to have the personal freedom libertarians desire.

The post Why libertarianism doesn’t work and the progressive theory of history appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

The western Left’s reaction to Buttigieg “winning” in Iowa tells us a lot about why the Right continues to be victorious

Mayor Pete hasn’t even won yet. Strangely, and in a major boost to Trump’s re-election hopes, the count in the Iowa Democrat presidential caucus continues on. This, however, has not stopped Bernie Sanders supporters across the west ganging up on Pete Buttigieg for daring to challenge their saviour in the Midwest. The whole thing is like a primer for why the western Left keeps losing, over and over again.

Some of the killer barbs at Buttigieg thrown around on social media yesterday were: he ran focus groups. Wow, what a crime. But hold on, he held focus groups on whether it was better to run as Pete or Peter and to figure out how people might pronounce his name easier. What an asshole, right? I mean, he might as well have said he was going invade Canada while wearing blackface. What else? He’s a “machine politician”. This is a painfully stupid argument given a). Buttigieg isn’t a machine politician, he’s the mayor of a large town in Indiana. He’s basically come from nowhere into the race and b). being a machine politician isn’t even a negative if you’re looking for someone to beat Trump. Ironically, the fact that Sanders is a machine politician and Buttigieg is not is a positive in Bernie’s column.

Some will leap in here with the idea that he primaries are always adversarial and what do you expect Bernie supporters to do? I’ll answer that. At least wait until the count is actually finished. Then see how New Hampshire shapes the race. It’s happening next Tuesday, guys. Sanders might need Buttigieg supporters further down the road if Pete can’t go all the way, so slagging him off needlessly this early on is counter-productive. Sanders did well in Iowa and looks on to be one of the final two contenders for the nomination unless things go really wrong from here. In fact, you want to know what the biggest impediment to Sanders getting the Democratic nomination is? His terrible supporters and their leftier-than-thou bullshit.

This all points to a bigger problem for the western Left. They are happier fighting amongst themselves than against the Right. And happier by a factor of about five at least. It’s become about who controls the centre-left party, not realising that it’s totally useless if that party cannot win power. It’s become hysterical, as evidenced in Iowa.

I kind of like Bernie. If you asked me to pick the person who would probably be able to beat Trump, I’d probably choose Sanders. I also like a lot of what he wants to do, and given for some of you I’m Mr Centre-right (although the actual centre-right people who read this will rightly laugh at such an idea) I suppose that’s probably saying something. You can actually convince a lot of people that what Bernie wants to do is the right thing and that he’s the right guy to do it just by explaining it all. You know, what they used to call campaigning. But stuff like slagging off Buttigieg for holding focus groups and being a “machine politician” (basically, for taking the idea of becoming president of the United States seriously) just turns potential supporters off. Reading the reaction to Iowa from Sanders supporters has left me feeling more negative about Bernie than anything the Republicans have ever put out about him. Sanders’ supporters are turning potential goodwill in their own camp into bile for no apparent gain.

There are lessons from Iowa for the British Left. The idea that if you shout loud enough and chuck insults around, you can get your political way. That if you just keep on insisting that you’re right, voters will eventually listen – and if they don’t, they weren’t the right kind of voters anyhow. You only want pure voters, even if there aren’t very many of them. Stop shouting and try convincing people instead, particularly people who identify as centre-left already. The electorate votes for the centre-left when they feel it is has a positive vision for the country that it can competently pull off. Shouting amongst yourselves is the exact opposite of that.

The post The western Left’s reaction to Buttigieg “winning” in Iowa tells us a lot about why the Right continues to be victorious appeared first on nicktyrone.com.

On reflection, this could be the Liberal Democrats biggest problem

In the immediate wake of the general election in December, I wrote a long piece about what I thought had gone wrong for the Lib Dems in a campaign they entered with massive hopes, only to end up losing net one seat. Last week, I wrote three pieces detailing the only space I feel the Lib Dems can electorally occupy and be successful. The responses to the four articles have been extremely interesting and helped me develop my thoughts on all of this. It has led me to understand a deeper problem the Lib Dems have as a party that I have previously never been able to articulate.

I think the biggest issue facing the Lib Dems, one that I think feeds into all the others and was really why the general election campaign was so bad, is that the party has a culture that is way, way too insular. The Lib Dems, I believe, are a lot more of a bubble than the two major parties. Yes, the Tories and the Labour Party have insularity problems of their own, as evidenced by Corbyn becoming leader, losing the last election very badly and the subsequent inability for much of the party to come to terms with why that happened. Yet what might save the Labour Party in the end is that it remains a reasonably large tent, as does the Conservative party, which at least gives them a chance to evolve into something more suited to the current electoral climate and win again.

Then I think: hold on, the Lib Dems are a weirdly broad tent themselves. You have everyone from people who wouldn’t really be all that uncomfortable on the Corbyn left mixed in with proper right of centre libertarians. But the way this plays out within the party, it doesn’t work as a big tent should, or at least, does within the two main parties. Perhaps this is a size issue, but in the Lib Dems I notice that instead of there being a substance-led ideological war between the different parts of the party, all of whom believe in wildly different things most of which are mutually exclusive, the Lib Dems just unite around the stuff they agree on and that becomes what the party is about. So, Brexit being bad (but not why exactly), electoral reform, legalising cannabis. Where all of the bread and butter stuff should be is either nothing, something vague, or on occasion, something pretty bad because no one can bother to have a fight with the process.

Although there has always been an element of this within the Lib Dems, going back to the merger, I think it got massively worse post-2015 election. In some ways, I can understand why – the party tried to engage with wider British politics and ended up getting decimated as a direct result. Yet the culture this has created led to the party not being able to take advantage of the defections from both main parties when they happened, as well as the general election campaign being so poor.

I thought the defectors would change the culture of the Lib Dems enough for the party to evolve a bit out of its 2015 shell, but no; they sort of got absorbed into the blob. Instead of the 2019 general election campaign being a celebration of a new, electable Lib Dems it was just a relaunch of Farron-era stuff sans the gay sin material. It was this inability to see how others see the party – what they like about it, what they don’t like about it – that made the general election campaign and its result inevitable.

The problem with having this as the Lib Dems’ major problem is that by its very nature it is almost impossible to fix. If a sudden influx of outsiders couldn’t shift the culture even a millimetre, it’s hard to know what could. I can already hear the responses to this article from many Lib Dems: what insularity problem? I don’t see it! Yes, you don’t see the problem – which is the problem.

The post On reflection, this could be the Liberal Democrats biggest problem appeared first on nicktyrone.com.