Aaron Ross Powell's Blog, page 4

Finding Meaning In Liberalism (w/ Akiva Malamet)

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Today’s conversation is a companion to our prior episode. I’m joined again by , managing editor of .

Last time we talked about identity within liberalism. Now we turn to meaning. Everyone wants to lead a meaningful life, but one of the critiques of liberalism is that a liberal society takes away traditional sources of meaning, and so leaves its citizens feeling detached, either unable to find meaning, or seeking it in frivolous, and so ultimately unmeaningful, pursuits. How compelling is this objection? And what should we, as liberals, do about it?

Podcast art by Sergio R. M. Duarte. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

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Is There a Place for Identity Politics? (w/ Akiva Malamet)

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It seems like everyone has an opinion about identity politics, but far fewer people have a clear definition of it. This is a problem, not just because arguing about vaguely defined terms is rarely productive, but also because identity plays a important role in how we ought to think about liberalism and the role of liberal institutions.

My guest today is , managing editor of . Our discussion digs into the nature of identity politics, the nature of identity itself, what it means to validate versus merely tolerate identities, and how that all plays into liberalism.

Read Akiva’s essay on liberalism, toleration, and identity politics.

Podcast art by Sergio R. M. Duarte. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

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The post Is There a Place for Identity Politics? (w/ Akiva Malamet) first appeared on Aaron Ross Powell.

How Corporations Govern (w/ Alexei Marcoux)

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Governments rule our lives, but quite a lot of us believe corporations do as well. And just like we can ask questions about how the states are governed, we can ask similar questions about corporations. How ought they to run themselves? Whose interests should they take into account? What social responsibilities, if any, do they have?

To help us think through these questions about corporate governance and the role of corporate institutions, I’m joined by Alexei Marcoux. He’s a Professor of Business, Ethics and Society and Institute for Economic Inquiry Senior Scholar at Creighton University’s Heider College of Business.

Podcast art by Sergio R. M. Duarte. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

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ReImagining Liberty is a listener supporter show. Become a supporter to get early access to all new episodes, as well as my essays.

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The post How Corporations Govern (w/ Alexei Marcoux) first appeared on Aaron Ross Powell.

Politics for Good People

Politics is bad, but why? What is it about politics that consistently produces both toxicity and mediocre results? Why is it so corrosive to our mental health and emotional wellbeing, a place that elevates demagogues, turns us against each other, and doesn’t seem to accomplish the tasks we expect a government to carry out?

After years working in politics, I have an answer: Our approach to politics is both unskillful and unethical. We are, simply, bad at it, and this manifests as incompetence in applying the tools of government and immorality in the ends we use government to achieve.

We need to be more mindful in our political action, and more ethical in our political aims. But to do that, we need a new way of thinking about both. That’s my philosophical project. I want to offer a perspective on politics that I believe is more skillful and more ethical than how most of us go about it. I’ve been developing this argument for a few years now, but not in a systematic way. This essay is the start of correcting it. I’ll present an overview while providing links to other essays I’ve written building out its various parts. (And I’ll add more links as I expand and clarify these ideas in future essays.)

Our Broken Politics

There are two ways our contemporary politics looks broken. The first is just that the political environment is irredeemably toxic. We’re angry all the time—at each other, at outside threats, at inside threats, whether real or, all too often, imagined. Hardening partisanship means seeing half the population as an enemy, and then turning to media sources to confirm just how bad those guys are.

The second is that the government doesn’t seem capable of accomplishing the things it ought to. So much of what the government does costs more than it ought to, is lower quality than we’d like, crowds out alternatives, is mired in partisan bickering, or is lost among competing interests. We want the government to solve problems, not cause them.

Both these vectors of dysfunction have a common source: unskillful politics. When we engage with the political sphere, we do so without skill and without an ethical perspective. The “we” here includes both professionals (politicians, bureaucrats) and ordinary citizens. “Skillful” entails not just knowledge of how to use the tools politics offers in a way that accomplishes our ends, but also an ethical perspective in choosing what those ends are and in how we approach accomplishing them. Without ethics, we will direct politics to immoral ends, and we will contribute to the toxic environment and values that make politics ineffective and encourage and compound unskillful use. Without knowledge and method, our political actions will fail to achieve even worthy ends, or will result in more suffering than they alleviate. 

What Politics is For

To get at what it looks like to use politics skillfully, we need to start with the question, “Use for what?” Politics has a purpose, and skillfully employing it means doing so in a way that achieves that purpose well. Of course, this is really a question about what government is for, or what the state is for. Because politics just is the mechanism we use to guide the state in choosing and carrying out its tasks.

So, what is the state for? Why do we have this thing at all? The answer, and one a skillful approach to politics demand we keep constantly in mind, is to solve social problems, to prevent them from arising in the first place, and to create benefits for those who live within—and occasionally without—its jurisdiction. In other words, the state is a tool for achieving the ends of a safe and prosperous society. It’s not the only tool we have for doing so, of course, and recognizing that other tools exist and might, in various circumstances, be more appropriate to use than state power is another aspect of skillful politics. But we can get to all of that later. For now, the state is a tool we use to prevent social problems, as well as maintain and improve the social and economic health of the polity. And politics is the way we guide and apply that tool. Thus to do politics well is to guide the state well in choosing when to use its power and how to use it.

A Political Physician

One way to think about this that I find helpful is to analogize the state to a physician. A physician’s job is to look out for the health of her patients, to offer them support in improving it, and to diagnose and treat problems when they come up. A physician is not the only tool we have for improving our health, of course. We might have a coach at our gym who gives us advice on productive ways to exercise, and recognizes barriers to physical health, such as injuries or lack of skill, and updates her advice to take those into account. But there are certain health related tasks that a physician is needed for, just as we can point to certain social ills where the state might appear to be the best solution.

At the same time, an unskillful physician can fail to diagnose an illness correctly, can prescribe an ineffective course of treatment, or can actually make our health problems worse. A skillful physician will apply her knowledge well, with the proper ends in mind, recognize when she needs to refer us to a specialist, and will constantly be on the lookout for more effective treatments.

In ancient India, the philosopher Siddhartha Gautama used this medical analogy to offer a method for addressing the stress, dissatisfaction, and suffering that was present in his life, the lives of those around him, and, indeed, the lives of all of us to this day. He didn’t set out to build a method for specifically political decision making, but politics is ultimately about those same problems, or at least some aspects of them, and the method forms the core of my approach to skillful and ethical politics.

A Skillful Political Method

This method depends upon asking four questions when we consider how we might use politics, or how we should approach a particular political question. These questions aren’t the whole of skillful politics, just as knowing facts of anatomy and physiology isn’t the whole of good doctoring, but they are the essence of it when they are applied and answered by someone with an ethical and wise perspective.

“What is the problem we’re trying to solve?” This seems like it would be obvious. We wouldn’t even be talking about politics in the first place if we didn’t have in mind something for it to do, or something that we hope to accomplish with it. But if you go to the doctor because your back hurts, you want the doctor to have a very clear sense that her task is alleviating your back pain. In the political sphere, we commonly frame the problem too broadly, for example, saying, “We want to solve the poor state of education” instead of “We want to make sure children are reading at a particular level at a particular age.” (And even that might be too broad.) If we don’t define the problem with enough precision, we won’t be able to tailor our solutions to it, and won’t be able to practically judge whether they are working.

“What is the cause of the problem?” Your back ache might be the result of an injury at the gym over the weekend. Or it might be cancer. Or it might just be that you slept awkwardly. Or countless other diagnoses. A skillful doctor will nail down exactly what is behind your pain before jumping to treatment. Likewise in politics, before we vote on new legislation or pass new regulation, we should be very clear on what is causing the problem we’ve set out to solve. Like the first question, this seems obvious, but it’s remarkable how often we either get this wrong, or don’t put effort into answering it in the first place. Part of this is because, while it’s complex enough to diagnose back pain, it’s orders of magnitude more difficult to zero in on the cause of poverty, or illiteracy, or an economic slump. (And this is made worse by our lack of skill in narrowing the answer to the first question, and so seeking to address a problem that is so big and nebulous that the potential causes—and interacting causes—of it are infinite.) There’s also another, subtler way we go wrong with the second question: we look not for what the cause of the problem is, but instead what we want it to be. Poverty is caused by immigration, because we don’t like immigrants, and so want to blame them for poverty. Housing shortages are caused by rich people owning lots of vacation homes, because we don’t like rich people, and so want to blame them for housing shortages. Skillful politics means resisting this urge, but resisting it means first recognizing it, something few of us are inclined to do.

“Can the cause be alleviated?” In the context of politics, and much else, this is really two questions. First, do we have a way to alleviate the cause? Is it something we are actually capable of doing? There might be political problems that, even if we know what the cause is, we can’t see a way to fix it. We either lack the knowledge or the power and ability to do so. Second, even if we can do it, are the costs so high as to make it practically impossible, or undesirable? If your back pain is cancer, it might be that we have a course of treatment available. But it might also be inoperable, and attempts to cure it are either themselves fatal, or likely to make your life so miserable that it’s reasonable to reject them. Likewise with politics. Some social problems might, in theory, be solvable, but the trade-offs so great that we have to reject the solution. If we have identified street crime as a problem, and criminals able to commit acts of violence without prevention as the cause, we might imagine undoing the cause by instituting a near total police and surveillance state, preventing anyone from finding the opportunity to commit crimes. But such a state would be unbearable and a profound violation of the liberties we view as worth preserving. It might just be that some crime is the price we pay for our valuable freedoms.

“What steps can we take to alleviate the cause?” This question only makes sense to ask once we’ve answered the prior three with sufficient clarity. If we don’t have a defined picture of what the problem is, don’t know what’s causing it, and haven’t asked ourselves whether it is within our power (or moral right) to fix it, then not only is there no point in coming up with a policy to address it, but rushing into a policy solution will prove no solution at all. If your doctor misdiagnoses your back ache, you might end up in a course of chemotherapy instead of physical therapy, and if a democracy misdiagnoses the sources of crime or poverty, we might end up with a populist backlash making both problems worse.

The final element of this method—after we’ve identified the problem, its cause, the possibility of a solution, and a course of action toward that solution—we need to hold fast to a feedback loop of assessing whether our proposed solution is, in fact, working and, if it is working, whether it is doing so at a cost we’re willing to pay. If the first treatment fails to cure the illness, a good doctor will go back, discover where she erred, and prescribe another.  A sad fact of politics is that this feedback loop—which demands honesty, diligence, and a willingness to make hard choices—gets lost, because the public consciousness moves on to other problems or because interests form around our initial solution, creating barriers to the kind of revision necessary to perform politics well.

Ethical Actors

This method, whether applied to the problem of suffering, a patient with a back ache, or national problems, isn’t carried out by machines, but by people. The results will only be as good as the people who guide and carry out the process. If we are unethical, our politics will produce unethical results, because we will pick problems that aren’t problems, or enact solutions that callously cause harm. We will see hurting people, or oppressing them, as the aim of government and its politics, instead of helping and freeing them. 

Skillful politics thus demands citizens who are sufficiently virtuous and knowledgeable to perform well, and who have the proper perspective on what is demanded of them and what they are using politics for. So much of what is wrong with our political culture isn’t (just) that we lack a proper decision making method, but that we enter into politics while ignorant of history, economics, political science, and all the other disciplines that help us answer the questions the method suggests. And we enter politics with corrupt values, an impoverished sense of our (inter)relationship with others, and a vision of the good society—and the common good—that, were we to achieve it, would represent a step backwards for wellbeing, progress, and morality.

Becoming ethical—for we are not born with all the knowledge and traits necessary to achieve that—is thus a central practice of skillful politics. And not just skillful politics, but skillful living, as well. We need to put effort into shaping ourselves into the kinds of people capable of doing politics well. Fortunately, what makes for good politics also makes for a good life, and so the hard work of bettering ourselves bears tremendous fruit, in terms of our own happiness and flourishing, even if we never set foot in the political sphere. Along those same lines, if we spend our time in the political sphere cultivating and practicing unethical habits and instilling corrupt values, those will inevitably carry over into our non-political lives. An ethical person is an ethical person wherever he finds himself, and it’s foolish to pretend you can be unethical in politics (or in business, or any other narrow domain of life) but leave that behind when you step out of it.

What are the features of an ethical person, and how can we cultivate those features in ourselves? That’s been the focus of quite a lot of my writing and so what follows is an all-too-brief summary of those works, assembling them as part of a larger picture.

A Liberal Social Perspective

Ethical politics demands the proper social perspective, one that takes into account and appreciates the fact that we share this world with diverse people, with diverse interests, in an environment that is constantly changing and evolving. This means that ethical politics begins by rejecting social conservatism (which, it is important to note, is critically distinct from individual conservatism), the idea that culture and the people within it should reflect our own, unchanging preferences. Not only is it morally wrong to demand that others seek the good life in a way of our choosing instead of theirs, but the belief that politics can stop social dynamism is a path to suffering, not just for others, but for ourselves. (See “Social Conservatism is Suffering”)

It’s not enough to simply say no to social conservatism. A fully ethical perspective will be one that sees toleration of difference as a moral floor, not a moral ceiling. We should strive to instead cultivate delight in the diversity of the world we find ourselves in, and make the happiness of others—even if they find it in ways we wouldn’t necessarily choose for ourselves—a constituent part of our own happiness. We should want others to be happy, and take joy in their achieving it. (See “Liberalism and Sympathetic Joy”)

This perspective need not be absolute, nor must it be present in the whole of the polity for democracy to function. But having it makes us better citizens, and strengthens our political institutions against populist, reactionary, and illiberal backsliding. Just as important, this perspective makes our own lives better and happier in an inevitably dynamic world. (See “Goodwill, Sympathetic Joy, and Liberalism’s Foundations”)

This takes work. It’s not our default way of seeing others, and the urge to feel threatened by difference and change is strong. But we can undertake practices that will help to change our perspective and our values, helping us to be happier and our politics healthier. (See “A Crash Course in Cultivating Liberal Virtues”)

Admirable Associations

Politics is about association. If all of us were hermits, we wouldn’t need politics. Government’s purpose is to enable us to live together in mutually beneficial ways. But the values and perspectives that help us to achieve that by encouraging a more skillful use of the tools of governance are fragile. They take effort to develop, but can slip away if we don’t reinforce them, and especially if our peers don’t value them, or encourage us to behave in ways counter to them. Ethics is a habit, and bad habits and bad role models destroy ethics. It is important that we surround ourselves with admirable people who will encourage us to better ourselves. (See “Surround Yourself With Those Who Are Admirable, and Distance Yourself From Those Who Aren’t.”)

We must also recognize that consensus isn’t correctness. That sometimes the good man is the odd man out. Democracy has a tendency to drift into thinking that majorities are right, and that if the majority believes something, they can’t be wrong—or that it is unfair (or “virtue signaling”) to tell the majority that it is in moral error. While it’s often advisable to disassociate from unadmirable people, sometimes that’s not an option, especially if unadmirable views find wide purchase, and so ethics asks us to demand that majorities change. (See “Hate Can Be Mainstream”)

Skillful Politics

This still-incomplete portrait of ethical and skillful politics above doesn’t give us all the right answers. In fact, none of it tells us the specific details of how our institutions should be structured, what policies we ought to prefer, or who we should vote for in any given election. I don’t want to deny the importance of those questions or minimize their difficulty. Instead, I see my project as helping to define what we need in order to engage with those questions thoughtfully and morally. 

I am a liberal, in the old school sense of that term, because I believe liberal politics are ethical politics and ethical politics are liberal politics. A full understanding of the nature of the state as a tool, including its limitations and alternatives, will discourage us from overusing it. And a strong ethical foundation coupled with knowledge of, and appreciation for, our diverse and dynamic world will encourage us to respect each others’ dignity, autonomy, and myriad paths to happiness.

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Surround Yourself With Those Who Are Admirable, and Distance Yourself From Those Who Aren’t.

Who we associate with and who we take into our circle of friends says as much—or more—about our moral character as the principles we claim to live by. But it goes deeper than that, because the influence runs in both directions. Our moral character is reflected in who our friends are, but who our friends are plays a significant role in the development and evolution of our moral character. If you spend your time around good people, that will influence you in positive directions. If you spend your time around bad people, that will have the opposite effect.

In the West, we tend to view ethics as an individual pursuit, and through a mostly intellectualized, rational, and autonomous frame. Our moral views, and the underlying character that motivates them, is something freely—and consciously—chosen. If we do good, it is because we have freely and consciously selected the right moral principles and then volitionally acted upon them. If we do bad, it is because those freely and consciously chosen principles were the wrong ones, or we were ignorant of, or misinterpreted, facts relevant to the situation that would have informed the application of our principles in a praiseworthy direction.

There’s much that’s correct about that. Obviously we can choose, and we are largely rational. But this individualistic view of the ethical process obfuscates how much of not just our moral reasoning but our moral perspective isn’t, at least in the moment, fully autonomous, and is instead the product of our environment and habits. (I say “at least in the moment” because we can change our moral perspective through a careful practice of cultivating virtues, but that isn’t simply a matter of intellectual understanding.) Our environment and habits—including who we associate with—not only make developing beneficial and practiced ethics easier or more difficult, but also play a large role in whether we recognize our own ethical failings in the first place.

This brings me one of my favorite lines in the whole of ethical philosophy. It comes from the Pali Canon, an ancient collection of philosophical dialogues in the Buddhist tradition. In the text called the Upaddha Sutta, the Buddha’s attendant Ānanda remarks that, “This is half of the holy life, lord: having admirable people as friends, companions, a colleagues.” And the Buddha corrects him: “Don’t say that, Ānanda. Don’t say that. Having admirable people as friends, companions, and colleagues is actually the whole of the holy life.” (Emphasis mine.)

Now this might at first seem odd. Buddhism is, after all, quite a vast and comprehensive philosophy, equal in richness and sophistication to anything in the Western tradition, and with elaborate theories of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, all aimed at the pursuit of an end of suffering. It brims over with concepts, arguments, sub-arguments, and lists. What, then, is the point of all that if the holy (ethical, admirable, praiseworthy, etc.) life is as simple as hanging out with admirable people?

But reflection makes clear what this idea drives at. The “holy life” is the ethical life, the life lived well, of happiness (and the absence of suffering), and one that is admirable to others. This isn’t a switch we flip. It’s not something we’re born knowing how to do, and it’s not something we can immediately be capable of doing, even if we have the intellectual understanding. Rather, the ethical life is a process of practice. It’s something we must train ourselves in. And I choose “train” precisely to distinguish this process from mere learning. You can know the rules of ethics and the principles of morality, but just as reading a book about how to throw a perfect pitch doesn’t make you a good pitcher, knowing the intellectual side of ethics doesn’t make you ethical. Rather, you need to practice. You need to internalize habits of ethical behavior, and you need to train your perspective to see the world in an ethical way.

Thus admirable companionship. The people you share your life with are the people you share your ethical journey with. We are social animals, not fully and autonomously self-made beings. How we behave and how we view the world and our place in it is influenced and given substance by how the people we surround ourselves with behave and view the world. We learn from each other, and our social ties constitute a significant portion of our identity. No only in the sense that they provide us a place, but also in that they form us. We build ourselves together.

When the Buddha says that that admirable friendship is the whole of the holy life, he’s pointing out that we just are, in large part, who we associate with. Our perspective is shaped by the perspectives of the people around us, our values shaped by their values, and the morally salient issues—and our resulting actions regarding them—filled in by the values our friends, companions, and associations find salient. What’s more, the fact that we recognize genuinely admirable people as admirable means that our ethical perspective has been tuned correctly. It means that we are ourselves ethical. Thus the ethical person will surround himself with admirable people, but it also requires that he be ethical to accomplish that in the first place. The holy life, then, just is the life of a person who has internalized enough of an ethical perspective that he surrounds himself with ethical people and, together, they support each other through this training and practice.

An upshot of this is that we shouldn’t just seek out admirable people, but that we should also, to the extent we can, distance ourselves from unethical, non-admirable people. If someone is unethical, we can have goodwill towards them and wish them eventual happiness through a change of views, but we don’t take them in, or maintain them, as friends and companions. To do so knowingly is to pull ourselves from the path of the holy life, and to do so unknowingly is a sign that something is wrong with our ethical perspective,and that we have considerable work to do in further cultivating it.

This can, of course, be awfully challenging. Giving up personal connections means releasing something that mattered to us, and might still matter to some degree. It’s difficult to lose friends, or to tell someone that you can no longer consider them a friend or companion. It can be costly, too. If you conclude that your employer’s leadership is of low moral character, or if the organization elevates people of low moral character, the ethical act is to try to change it and, failing that, to leave. But paychecks can be hard to come by.

Further complicating matters is the growing belief that disassociation is censorship, that it’s cancel culture to tell someone you wont associate with them anymore, not give them a platform, not make them part of your intellectual or emotional life. It’s not freedom of association you’re exercising, this narrative suggests, but instead opposition to freedom of expression. That’s, of course, nonsense. There’s a world of difference between shutting down someone’s speech, seeking to take it away, and having no interest in hearing it, or having no interest in making the speaker part of your life. Further, the narrative that disassociation is censorship is cynically used by those who want to benefit from the controversy their hateful views inevitably cause, while avoiding any social and personal consequences for their actions. It’s why so many people who claim to be the targets of cancel culture are instead just upset that others are criticizing them. They use freedom of speech and freedom of association opportunistically.

But there must be consequences in the form of disassociation. Not only because consequences disincentivize the behavior that lost them friends, but because if disassociation is the consequence, then it’s one that’s necessary for the ethical lives of the people doing the disassociating. The more we are surrounded by unadmirable, unethical people, the less admirable and ethical we’ll be ourselves. And the less admirable and ethical we are, the more our lives will be unhappy, the more they will be filled with the kind of suffering the holy life seeks to avoid and extinguish.

In another early philosophical dialogue discussing admirable friendship, we are told to seek out those “who are consummate in conviction, consummate in virtue, consummate in generosity, consummate in discernment.” For once we have found them, once we have made sure our circle of friends and companions is an ethical one, we can emulate “consummate conviction in those who are consummate in conviction, consummate virtue in those who are consummate in virtue, consummate generosity in those who are consummate in generosity, and consummate discernment in those who are consummate in discernment. This is called admirable friendship,” the Buddha says. And it’s arguably the most important thing to have in our lives.

Toward a Healthier Libertarian Movement

Libertarianism can have a bright future. But first it needs to break its decades-long alliance with the GOP.ReImagining Liberty is my project, as a podcast and essay series, to address the concerns raised in this article.

I worry about the future of the libertarian movement.

America faces an acutely precarious political environment, with immediate and severe threats to liberty that go beyond what P. J. O’Rourke once called, “wrong within normal parameters.” It’s not just that we’re staring down rising inflation and a possible recession. It’s that one of the two major parties, always a few marginal voters away from winning elections, has made clear it will subvert those elections, rejects the rule of law, and has abandoned any pretext that institutions should constrain the pursuit of power.

The contemporary Republican Party doesn’t much value individual and economic liberty, either, but is instead committed to enforcing a narrow conception of what it means to be a “real American,” drawn along nationalist, racial, populist, and culturally reactionary lines. It is happy to use state power to punish those who dissent. This amounts to a genuine crisis of liberty, and one from which our democracy and our freedoms might not recover. If given another opportunity in the White House, the GOP’s preferred autocrat and his enablers will have the experience and groundwork necessary to inflict potentially fatal damage to the country’s governing institutions.

We need a strong defense of liberty, one that can appeal to the many Americans, on the right and left, who worry that our basic freedoms are on the line in a way unique in recent memory. We need a strong libertarian movement because liberty is under threat, libertarians have the most principled and developed arguments for liberty, and, because we needn’t get caught up in partisan loyalties, we can speak across party divides.

Yet many in the movement are actively moving in the wrong direction, not just with the alt-right takeover of the Libertarian Party, but also in doubling down on a Republican-fusionist approach to policy advocacy. Partisan entanglements and cultural tribalism have obscured how much of a threat the American right represents, both to the country and to libertarianism itself.

For our purposes here, the “libertarian movement” means American libertarianism’s political mainstream: the Libertarian Party (the movement’s most recognizable brand), but also DC’s public policy scene. This essay is about the ways portions of the libertarian movement have drifted from core principles and what’s needed to get back on track.

How We Got Here

Most people, and I know this from having spent a decade as a professional liberty advocate, view libertarianism as part of the right. We’re “Republicans who smoke pot” (although I am neither a Republican, nor do I smoke pot) or else “Hippies of the right.” When I was at the Cato Institute, we were constantly frustrated by journalists referring to our scholars as part of the “conservative Cato Institute.” And while it’s true that libertarians aren’t conservatives (in fact, conservatism is fundamentally in opposition to libertarianism), there’s a simple reason so many people think we’re on the right: We’ve spent decades signaling to them that we are.

The left is where the libertarian movement finds its intellectual antecedents. Libertarianism began as a movement within liberalism, against the conservatism that defined the right. As Murray Rothbard put it,

[T]here developed … two great political ideologies, centered around this new revolutionary phenomenon: the one was Liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was Conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the old order. … Political ideologies were polarized, with Liberalism on the extreme “Left,” and Conservatism on the extreme “Right,” of the ideological spectrum.

In the middle of the 20th century, when libertarians joined with the right against the threat of communism, libertarianism came to view itself not just in alliance with the right, but as part of it. This was an odd fit from the beginning, because while both libertarianism and conservatism opposed communism, the conservative objection had more to do with the Soviet Union as a great power threat to American global dominance, communism’s “godlessness,” and the ways domestic communists were advocating for racial justice, worker empowerment, and social liberalization. Communism was bad, and the Soviet Union did appear to be an existential military threat to the United States (though, with access to Soviet archives, perhaps less of a threat than it appeared at the time).

But why communism, as an ideology, was bad looked rather different from a right-wing versus libertarian perspective. CIA director Allen Dulles and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover spent a lot of time rooting out communists. But it had more to do with being cultural reactionaries and viewing global communism as a threat to politically connected American multinationals than it did the libertarian fears of central planning vs. free market economics and creeping authoritarianism. Conservatives at the time worried about communism taking away our “American freedoms,” yet worried rather less about Jim Crow taking away some Americans’ freedoms. In other words, this alliance against the threat of communism didn’t mean there was much, if any, compatibility between libertarianism and the American right when it came to philosophy or public policy.

Frank Meyer, at the National Review, concocted the confused muddle that came to be known as “fusionism,” the idea that conservatives could embrace a libertarian view of (very) limited government, while libertarians could embrace the right’s idea that free citizens should cultivate, and a free society is dependent upon, specifically conservative virtues. The problem with the deal was that libertarians were correct about government, but conservatives were wrong about virtue. Limited government is good, but so are the liberal virtues of tolerance, celebration of diversity, dynamism, and radical self-authorship.

Then Ronald Reagan came along and supercharged fusionism, making libertarians believe they’d finally ascended in the conservative movement, all the way to the top. After all, it was Reagan who said, “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” But, of course, it was also Reagan who launched his political career by promising to crack down on the freedom of expression and association of students protesting a deeply unjust war.

A Distorted Libertarianism

This shift, from liberal to conservative, had a number of consequences for libertarianism, even though there are many libertarians it doesn’t describe. First, libertarian organizations came to see the right as their primary outreach direction. Even today, many libertarians put most, if not all, of their student outreach efforts into young conservatives. Comparatively little attention is given to young progressive groups; their members are dismissed as “not gettable,” simply too opposed to liberty to be worth the effort. This is related to another consequence of fusionism, namely a greater emphasis on economic freedoms (where conservatives and libertarians used to at least somewhat agree) than social freedoms (where conservatives have more difficulty getting on board with liberty).

The result, at least within mainstream libertarianism, is that conservatives tend to be welcomed, and their anti-liberty deviations more readily overlooked (Hoppeanism, the Mises Institute, and lawmakers like Thomas Massie and Rand Paul), while progressives are made to feel unwelcome, their deviations seen as evidence that they can’t be potential allies (AOC is wrong about plenty of economic issues, but is one of the more libertarian members of the House when it comes to criminal justice, surveillance, and other civil liberties).

This means a movement dominated by people who came from the right. “But what does it matter where people came from if they’re all now libertarians?” you might ask. Yet people are naturally tribal, and we rarely drop our influences entirely. If you came from the right, chances are you’re more comfortable around those still on the right, and tend to find greater salience in political concerns of the right. And chances are you’ll tend to feel culturally distant from people on the left, and to brush aside social and policy concerns mostly talked about by the left.

This leads to a lopsidedness in assessing threats to liberty, an asymmetry regarding which issues libertarians are loud about (those palatable to conservatives) and which they’re quieter on (those upsetting to conservatives). This means, for example, too often taking the right’s side in the culture war, or having more sympathy for it, while mustering greater skepticism for social arguments originating on the left. This mood affiliation with conservatives means giving them the benefit of the doubt, while holding the left to a higher evidentiary standard, and being more willing to (even if unconsciously) strawman their views. It means putting more effort into working with Republican lawmakers than Democratic ones, and continuing to view Republican lawmakers as “friends of liberty” even as they expose themselves as deeply anti-libertarian in a rightward direction. Libertarians are quick to forgive, overlook, or downplay GOP deviations as minor points of disagreement, especially when it comes from lawmakers, like Massie and Paul, who are seen as friends of the movement. At the same time, lawmakers on the left, who in fact hold pro-liberty views on a range of issues, get tarnished as “socialists.” They are only the enemy because they happen to hold non-libertarian views in a leftward direction.

When it comes to the activism of the Libertarian Party, probably the most recognized brand in our movement, as well as the general tenor of the young libertarian movement, we see a flood of right-wingers, including right-wing reactionaries. As long as you’re “fighting back against the left,” you’re welcome, even if what you’re fighting back against is the left’s calls for greater openness and toleration, and the breaking down of unjust, and often state reinforced, social hierarchies. (It’s part of the reason libertarians have generally been bad at talking about race, sneering at issues of racial justice, even though our political theory has a great deal of importance to say about the topic.)

All of this creates a feedback loop of increasing right-wing radicalism. Anyone from the left or center-left who looks into libertarianism will get a strong first impression that it’s partisan and tribally right-wing. It doesn’t help that the Libertarian Party has been taken over by “paleolibertarians,” who are openly nationalist, xenophobic, anti-semitic, anti-LGBT, anti-feminism, and frequently pro-Trump and pro-coup. Or when they see prominent libertarians inflating the threat of “wokeness” while treating the Trump administration as just another set of politicians, wrong within normal parameters, to advise.

People I’ve talked with on the left have told me on several occasions that I’m the first libertarian they’ve come across who they didn’t think was a right-winger, and who didn’t immediately make them feel like libertarianism was only a place for conservatives. And while I’m decidedly not the only liberal libertarian, their experience of our movement, especially online, was so off-putting that it should be cause for real concern. Young people who are now exploring and developing political identities do that work online, and libertarianism is usually showing them a movement that is needlessly and wrongly hostile to many of their values.

This doesn’t just mean that the libertarian movement’s rightward signaling has cut them off from potentially becoming libertarians, either. Given the way American politics sorts itself into teams, and the way talking across teams is challenging for many, people with libertarian sympathies turned off by the movement’s right-wing appearance are likely to end up further from libertarianism than if they hadn’t explored it in the first place. “Those guys are awful,” they think after their first impression. “I want to make sure I’m very much not like that.”

Holding Back Change

Libertarianism is fundamentally a radical philosophy. “Libertarians … are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed,” Rothbard wrote. “But this is a grave mistake, responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians… As we have seen, Conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty.” Fusionism’s legacy is in making much of the libertarian movement forget that. (Including, it’s sad to say, Rothbard himself. Later in his career, he abandoned his own principles and turned instead to paleolibertarianism, which is libertarian in name only.)

This mistaken identification with conservatism and the Republican Party brings opportunity costs. By allying ourselves with one side, we miss out on chances to work with people outside of that political and cultural tribe. But the damage goes deeper.

Libertarianism should be positioning itself as an appealing alternative to rising illiberalism, and as the philosophical foundation of the cosmopolitan side in the emerging cosmopolitan/populist divide. We have an opportunity to reinvigorate our movement, and help instill a deeper culture of liberty. But doing that means breaking free from partisan alliances, and no longer seeing ourselves (and thus encouraging others to view us) as part of a right-wing that is turning increasingly against cosmopolitanism and liberty.

Within the libertarian movement itself, both in the Washington think tank scene and in grassroots activism, however, there’s less desire for change than there ought to be. Instead many argue that the old strategies are still worthwhile, and that no matter how bad the right has become, the left is still always and only the enemy.

Even where there is a desire for change, or just where there’s a recognition of how far from libertarian the Republican Party and American conservatism have drifted, there are strong incentives against acting on it. Part of that is financial. Libertarian organizations get much of their funding from right-of-center sources, because decades of the fusionist strategy meant looking to the right to fundraise. But money’s not the only issue.

There’s the cultural alignment discussed earlier. Because so many libertarians came from the right, their social networks are largely within the right. Pushing back on conservative alliances means pushing back on friends, peer groups, and circles in which libertarians often feel most comfortable. This isn’t helped by the fact that libertarianism is very white, male, and middle- and upper-class, making it harder (but not contradictory) to empathize with the concerns of the poor, women, and minorities. Which, in turn, makes the movement a less welcoming place to those groups, and so even less diverse.

This cultural affiliation plays out in news consumption habits, too. I’m frequently discouraged by how many libertarians turn for political commentary and cultural analysis chiefly or exclusively to right-wing sources. If they want to learn about ideas, arguments, and ideologies of the left, they don’t go to the people who believe or advocate them, but instead look to what right-wing sources have to say about them. No one should turn to James Lindsay to get up to speed on critical theory, nor Stephen Hicks on postmodernism, nor Dave Rubin on social justice, but too many do.

Arguably there is also the ongoing influence of Ayn Rand. While a case can be made that the philosophy of Objectivism is not right-wing — and Rand herself was socially radical for the time — Randianism frequently takes on a right-wing flavor in its approach to social justice matters, its belligerent foreign policy, and Rand’s (often ignorant) rejection, and lack of curiosity about, philosophies different from her own.

Lastly, we can’t dismiss simple sunk costs thinking. The libertarian movement has spent over half a century developing deep ties to the right, cultivating relationships with Republican lawmakers, working itself into conservative circles, and recruiting largely from the political and cultural right. It has an infrastructure in place, and human capital built up to those ends. That’s a lot of resources, and decoupling from the right means not only giving up on some of them, but also putting new resources into building relationships with people we aren’t as used to. It’s far easier to say “We can make this old thing work” than it is to admit it’s time to try something new.

The Way Forward

Even if it’s hard, though, change is needed. A non-fusionist libertarianism can be a voice for principled radicalism in America’s political realignment, while more seriously combatting the immediate threats to American liberties coming from the right. Seeing the right and the GOP as the best or only path forward for libertarianism hasn’t produced many great victories, and it’s difficult to imagine how it will in the future. Even if we view the Reagan-era Republican Party through the foggiest of rose-colored glasses, that era was an historical aberration, and one unlikely to come back. The fact is libertarianism doesn’t have a home on the right, and it never really did. We were more like tolerated house guests, kept around because we were sometimes rhetorically useful.

How to change, then? How can libertarianism break free of fusionism and, in so doing, become healthier, more diverse, more forward-thinking, and, yes, more effective? The first step is pushing back on our right-wing branding. Whenever I say it’s time to abandon fusionism, I’m told, “The left wants nothing to do with us.” (Of course, the right is increasingly explicit that it wants nothing to do with us.) And while the many fruitful conversations I’ve had with people on the left, even the far left, show that’s not true, it is the case that the left is more skeptical about libertarianism than the right used to be. But it’s a mistake to view that as a consequence of something more libertarian about the right. Instead, it’s merely a self-fulfilling prophecy, the consequence of decades of libertarians telling the left they’re part of the right, and telling the left that, when it comes to liberty, they are always and exclusively the enemy.

Likewise, I’m told, “The right is more welcoming to us.” While that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, with the intellectual vanguard of the right going out of its way to repudiate liberalism, if we do find more friends among the right, it’s because, again, we spent decades embedding libertarians in the conservative movement. If you and a bunch of your friends crash a party, the fact that you now have friends at that party tells you nothing about whether the other attendees want much to do with you.

Breaking the feedback loop means putting in the effort both to reach out to a more diverse audience and to be an audience to more diversity. It means, at the very least, subverting the stereotype of libertarians as right-wingers by no longer signaling that we’re right-wingers. Mere denials when, for instance, journalists refer to libertarian think tanks as “conservative,” aren’t enough, because actions, or silence on important issues, make those denials more difficult to believe.

Rebranding as genuinely politically independent, as no longer “of the right,” won’t happen overnight, but it can’t happen at all until we start. We need to convince potential new allies, potential new libertarians, and just everyday Americans that we’re not on board with the insanity of the American right–and especially that we’re not Republicans, because the Republican brand is irredeemably tarnished.

Against a Counter-Fusionism

That shouldn’t be taken as a call for libertarians to enact a left-fusionism with Democrats and progressives. If fusionism was a mistake, it’s a mistake we shouldn’t repeat by picking a different team. The left is decidedly un-libertarian, too, and many on the left have such a strong moral aversion to radically free markets that they’ll never get fully on board with libertarian economics. It’s wrong to downplay the threats to American liberty and prosperity coming from the Democratic Party. Genuine independence is possible. Yet we also shouldn’t let recognizing the threats to liberty on the left turn into mindless, partisan false equivalence. In the current political environment, forcing an equivalency on the two parties in terms of the immediate and dire threat they represent to the basic institutions upon which our freedoms depend is unserious and dangerous.

Ending right-wing fusionism doesn’t mean cultivating a left-wing variant. The path forward is found in abandoning partisan alliances and focusing instead on issue specific opportunities. But those opportunities, if we go looking for them, are hurt by decades of fusionism and the continuing projection of libertarianism as part of the right. The Republican Party has become so toxic to so many that libertarians who appear to have either embraced it in its current form, or are seen as uncritical fellow-travelers, risk rejection when we talk to activists and lawmakers on the left to help with criminal justice reform, anti-war activism, or other causes where one would think we might find common cause. You cannot persuade anyone of what you are saying if they think you are a threat, and so long as we lack true independence, but are instead part of an increasingly authoritarian coalition, we’ll be seen as a threat.

A Healthier Liberty Movement

Reagan’s GOP isn’t coming back. Classical liberalism’s home within the right was short-lived, and the Republican Party has reverted to the full-throated populism endemic to the American right throughout its history. The economic freedom where libertarians once aligned has been replaced by nationalist calls for autocracy and efforts to use state power to punish businesses that don’t toe the social conservative line. That’s simply what the GOP is today. A libertarian-Republican coalition doesn’t make sense anymore, if it ever did. If the GOP gets worse, and there’s every reason to believe it will, then libertarians risk being judged by history as the people who fretted about marginal tax rates while palling around with lawmakers who voted to steal a presidential election and who are actively trying to return an authoritarian, and arguably fascist, leader to power.

The path to a healthier libertarian movement is abandoning partisan alliances, and reaching out to a diverse audience, including an audience outside the right. Network beyond conservative circles and put in the effort to understand non-conservative ideas fairly. We need to be a more open audience to ideas outside our comfort zone. Not just because we might learn something, but also because putting the effort into understanding, and welcoming engagement with, the ideas of others, outside of conservative circles, makes others more likely to be willing to engage our ideas, as well.

In having those conversations, though, we need to be aware of how our messaging is coded right and how changing it can make it appealing to new audiences, without abandoning our principled commitment to radical liberty. We should take seriously the concerns of people outside of conservatism, and be ready to discuss how liberty provides answers to those concerns, instead of brushing the concerns off as ill-informed, ideologically blinkered, or “woke.”

In a country pulled in illiberal directions, with a growing number looking for ways to use the state to punish their cultural enemies, a strong commitment to liberty is crucial. The good news is, libertarianism can thrive and persuade, building a new culture of liberty across partisan divides. But it’s going to take shedding learned perspectives that, while perhaps comfortable, are counter-productive. It’s going to take abandoning the idea that libertarianism needs to “pick a side” and instead embracing robust, non-partisan, conspicuous independence.

Libertarianism can find its bright future. But the first step is admitting how dark the American right has become.

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This is a Sample Post

This is a sample post.

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Curse of Honor

The first of the new Legend of the Five Rings novels is pretty fun.

I’m kind of a sucker for shared world fiction, so long as the world is great. Two years ago, I read or listened to nearly fifty Warhammer 40,000 novels in a twelve month period, which was both awesome and maybe not something to be proud of. This week, I dipped my toes in a different world, with the new in a new series of Legend of the Five Rings novels from Aconyte.

I’m a big fan of the new edition of the card game. It’s maybe the best card game I’ve ever played, dethroning Netrunner and the old Dune CCG. But I’d never gotten super into L5R lore. The novels seemed like a good way to do that. And Curse of Honor, by David Annandale, which is the first, and so far only, released book in the series turned out to be a lot of fun.

The story didn’t end up where I expected it’d go. Or rather, it did in a sense, but took an unexpected route getting there. The only real knocks against it, and they’re minor, are that the pacing is a bit off at times (some events drag, other important stuff wraps up in a paragraph or two) and I would’ve liked to spend more time discovering the lore of the main antagonist and location. But overall, I breezed through it, appreciated the strong Rokugan feel, and really liked the well-developed tone and vibe of the story and prose. It starts with a storm in the mountains, and maintains a cold, quiet feel, even as the action hits. I look forward to more L5R novels.

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